There’s an interesting and disturbing article in the New Statesman about the 2,000 children who pass through UK holding centres each year. Their imprisonment, as reporter Alice O’Keeffe points out, breaches a key UN Convention.

When nine-year-old Adeboye Falode grows up, he wants to be on The X Factor. “I want to be a singer,” he says in a broad Irish accent. “Or a footballer.” He says it with a shamefaced little smile, as if he is already aware that his life will not work out like that. Currently, Adeboye is under lock and key at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, along with his mother, Aderonke, and his brothers Adedire, 12, and Adebowale, 14.

In order to get from the visitors’ area to their room in the “family unit”, Adeboye and his brothers must pass through up to ten locked doors and undergo a search. “They make you feel like a criminal, when you haven’t done anything wrong,” says Adebowale. Like the 2,000 other children who pass through the UK’s immigration removal centres each year, they have no access to primary NHS care if they fall ill. The food they are given each day consists primarily of chips and rice: “It’s disgusting.” They have all been taken out of school – particularly worrying for Adebowale, who was studying for his GCSEs next year. He wants to be a doctor. “I just want to go to school and do normal work,” he says. How will he feel if he is still in detention this Christmas? “I’ll probably explode.”