The UK has a responsibility to welcome and protect refugees and migrants – not help drive them to take risks

Editorial: Now is the time for progressive and cooperative action to bring back order and decency into Britain’s immigration policy

Nothing can ever wipe clean the slate after a human tragedy on the scale of the loss of life of the 39 migrants who died in a lorry in Essex. But one thing we can do, indeed must do, is to seek to learn from it. It is our duty to them, and it is our duty to humankind.

There is an immediate response, which is to blame the people who “organise” the human traffic. That is understandable and, in its own terms, correct. That people should seek to profit from the misery of others in this way is utterly abhorrent. The law must carry through its course. But this is the most partial of reactions, for we are not just dealing with 39 avoidable deaths.

We are dealing with thousands more. As we report today, the UN Refugee Agency estimates that at least 18,900 men, women and children have died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea since January 2014. The Foreign Affairs Committee, responding to this catastrophe, makes the central point that by closing borders the effect is to drive migrants to take more dangerous routes. The beneficiaries are the criminal groups that run these networks. We should accept that we are part of the problem.

So what’s to be done? What are those lessons that we must as a country learn? Accepting the thrust of the MP’s report is a good place to start. Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the committee, notes that this is an area where cooperation with Europe is vital. This is an emergency for the European continent, and the fact that the UK has, thanks to its location, been relatively isolated from it should not allow us to think we can somehow evade our responsibilities.

The committee makes a number of points. One is that the UK should expand legal pathways to migration, for example by processing asylum claims for those with relatives in Britain more swiftly. Another is that we should work with France to improve conditions in migrant camps across the Channel.

We should work with other European nations to reintroduce search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. And we should look at the wider forces that drive migration, including climate change, and take more forceful action to tackle these. Sadly we have to acknowledge that these forces are likely to gather strength in the years ahead, rather than hoping, like Mr Micawber, that something will turn up to check them.

This is not a call for completely open borders. No country in the world has that. Rather it is a call for rational, progressive and cooperative action to bring back order and decency into our migration policy.

We need to welcome people who bring much-needed skills to our land. We need to play our part in providing shelter and support to genuine refugees fleeing terror and oppression.

We need to work with other countries in Europe and beyond to tackle the underlying reasons for the global migrant crisis. And we have to look into ourselves and ask why it takes 39 people dying in a lorry to make us do so.