I’ve worked in a French refugee camp. Here’s why smashing the smuggling gangs won’t work

We need these people as much as they need us, but no political party will ever dare to be honest about it

You can keep your three-word slogans. “Take back control.” “Stop the boats.” “Smash the gangs.” They add up to what? More dead children. That’s the reality, or the norm, as more people desperately try to cross the Channel. 
Just two weeks ago 12 people, including six children and a pregnant woman, died trying to cross this perilous stretch of water. The journey is fraught with danger even before they get to the Channel, of course. 
This week, off the coast of Italy, another boat that contained 60 people from Sudan, Syria and Iran sank. Their rubber inflatable was driven onto the rocks and ripped in two. Eight people died and a baby was taken to hospital with hypothermia.
Yet all this hardly makes the news. Nearly 22,000 people have come this way this year, risking life and limb to get here. They arrive with nothing, yet they are spoken of as invaders, as vermin and as non-human. It seems a very long time ago since that picture of a dead toddler Alan Kurdi, a Syrian child of Kurdish descent, moved us. 
On it goes, and Starmer is meeting Giorgia Meloni to discuss whether migrants may be processed elsewhere. Anywhere but here right? Where we have a backlog of asylum claims?
In between the politicking, the demonising of desperate people and the sheer waste and immorality of the Rwanda scheme, people smugglers will still be on the beaches launching terrified souls off in little more than paddling pools.
Why don’t they stay in France? Why are they so determined to get to Britain? If you want to know why, I suggest you get yourself over to Calais, or Dunkirk, and see how they are living. 
I did some years ago when “the Calais jungle” was still going, before it was bulldozed down. It was rough. A doctor I was with was helping women who were pregnant through rape. We found two little Afghan boys, aged about 10 or 11, full of scabies and sleeping in a ditch. Their fingerprints had been burnt off. The French police stopped us and asked what we were doing with these “Islamists”. The police there do not hide what they think about these migrants: they tear gas them, beat them and smash their phones, which represent their entire worlds. They’re a record of their journey, a connection to where they have come from and where they want to go. 
During my time helping in “the jungle”, the cold and fear got in my bones. But it was nothing compared to what I saw in the woods of the Grande Synthe commune. It was a muddish hell with, no electricity, no running water and no toilets. Women, mainly Kurdish, were frying whatever they could in tiny stoves in these flammable, flimsy tents. I have been to lots of terrible places in the world: this did not meet any kind of humanitarian standards.
Before “the jungle” was razed to the ground, we had Sangatte. Have we learned from them? Clearly not, when there are still people massing on the French coast. This is the last leg in years of journeying through Turkey, Libya, Cyprus etc…
The migrants will continue to come to Britain because they know they are but 20 miles from a place where English is spoken, where they have families, where they might have lives instead of living in this terrible limbo. They have risked death many times before.
When I came back from this horror – an hour away on the Eurostar – I volunteered in a drop-in centre for refugees. We cooked them a good meal, ate with them, sorted out clothes, gave English lessons, helped them write letters or played games with them. Sometimes we just talked. The pictures that the kids drew were full of guns, torture, blood, and beheadings. The Eritrean women often sat and just gazed into the middle distance. The Eastern Europeans were mostly homeless but worked on building sites, eventually getting sent home. 
My favourites were the Syrians. They were educated and though they went through some of the worst atrocities, it was possible to see that they would make a life here. They had been pharmacists and poets. They wanted their English to be good enough to do MBAs.
All of them wanted to work but could only do so through the black economy. I won’t pretend that all of these people were genuine asylum seekers or that there wasn’t tension between these groups. Some were economic migrants, some were mentally ill, some were homeless…
One old man with a long matted beard who we thought was Russian would come in freezing and starving. We knew only that he lived “in a forest” and never really spoke to anyone. But one day he sat down at the piano and played Bach. Who knew what his life had been?
For all of the persecution by police, many migrants actually do stay in France. This is because safe and legal routes have been cut off for them: that is what our politics has achieved. You cannot smash the gangs until you give people a legal alternative. Until that arrives, those who have left war-torn countries to get here know about bravery. If this government had a scintilla of bravery it would be to recognise that we need migrants and they need us. No party dares be honest about this. The price of dishonesty is those tiny bodies floating face down in freezing water.