IS it any surprise that the Neil Carmichael MP has voted to reject a plan to allow 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from EU camps into the UK?

Mr Carmichael voted to bomb these Syrian refugee children out of their homeland so that they lost their parents and ended up as refugees.

It’s shameful that he is not taking responsibility for his actions.

This isn’t the first time he has voted to attack the most vulnerable.

He has voted to remove vital benefits from the disabled and also, to scrap tax credits for hundreds of thousands of struggling families.

Let’s stop believing the propaganda about austerity and ‘migrants’ and look at the evidence.

More people have emigrated from the UK over the last century than those who have entered the country.

Therefore, we have the need for what social scientists call a balancing of the ‘dependency ratio’.

This is where as we have had declining birth rates over the last century and a growing older population, it means that the gap in the working age population must be filled to help ensure the continuation of a tax base and funds for public services that the population rely on.

Immigration is vital to this and, refugees will further contribute to balancing this.

According to statistics from HMRC; EU migrants accounted for only 2.5 per cent of benefits the Department for Work and Pensions administered in 2014 - mostly out-of-work benefits - in 2014, and seven per cent of tax credits, hardly the drain on our economy the newspapers tell us.

Secondly, the Panama Papers leaks show us that if affluent people paid their taxes like the rest of us, we would have at least an extra £4.4 billion to spend on essential services that are being cut in our communities that help us and would help accommodate refugees.

Debbie Hicks

Stroud