Hundreds of refugees tried to storm the Eurotunnel Paris terminal on Tuesday, attempting to sneak onto buses and trains. There are now thought to be 5,000 migrants in Calais – double the number in December – many within a makeshift camp known as “The Jungle”, and nine have died trying to cross into the UK since the start of June.
Combined with strikes from French farmers, the disruption has left hundreds of lorries stranded on the British side, leading to huge tailbacks on the M20 (the main British route to the tunnel).
This situation should never have been allowed to build up in the first place, says Ross Clark in the Daily Express. We should “announce that no migrant arriving from France will be allowed to make an asylum application in Britain”. We certainly need “a radical response”, agrees Ukip MEP Steven Woolfe in The Daily Telegraph.
“The UK should deploy British troops to treble border staff in Calais” and urge the French government to do the same. If that doesn’t work, then we should close the border “until immediate action is taken”. Yes, this may “cause some disturbance to holiday plans and some businesses may face minor disruption”. However, “it will send out a powerful message to the French authorities and that’s what’s needed”.
Many of these migrants “have risked death multiple times escaping from Eritrea, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria”, says The Guardian’s Anne Perkins. Given the chaos (and the near-£1m cost so far), it’s understandable that “most of Kent would like to be cut adrift from the rest of the UK and floated off to the Western Isles”.
But “we have an international, humanitarian obligation as surely now as we did to people fleeing Hitler 80 years ago”, and in any case, the UK “takes only a fraction of the number of refugees and asylum seekers that Germany or Sweden takes”. We “owe it to them and to our own idea of what it means to be British to do more, quickly and humanely”.