TWENTY-SEVEN people died in the English Channel this week. Twenty-seven human beings had their lives cut short while seeking a safer future for them and their families. It breaks my heart hearing each new piece of information that comes out about this tragedy, about the pregnant women who drowned, about the three little children who were on board.

Just close your eyes for a few seconds and imagine yourself there, imagine the terror as the boat capsizes, imagine reaching for your child as they are swept away from your arms, imagine your last thoughts as you realise you are drowning and your life is over.

My utter anguish at this gut-wrenching loss of life is matched only by a sense of rage that so many of us feel, knowing that each and every one of those people would be alive and well if different decisions were made by the UK and other governments. This was a tragedy but it was a totally preventable tragedy.

There are people in that Westminster Parliament lamenting this terrible event and I’ve no doubt they are very upset by it. But some of them will have created or voted for policies that contributed to those deaths. They have got to start facing up to this – especially now because on December 8 they will be voting for even harsher policies.

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The Nationality and Borders Bill will do nothing to tackle the people smugglers, nothing to create routes to get here safely and will, instead, criminalise people like the 27 who died last week. It would enable the pregnant women to be jailed for up to four years. It would mean anyone who tried to help those drowning at sea could also face a prison term.

The children could be sent offshore never to be reunited with their families. That’s what the bill is about. That’s the Tory solution. But this could be a seminal moment in the UK’s history of its human rights obligations. Conservative MPs can vote against these policies or they can be honest with themselves and their constituents that they think this is the price worth paying to keep people out. They can’t have it both ways.

I do not say this lightly but the Home Secretary in particular will share some of the responsibility for more deaths in the Channel if she does not provide safe routes for people to enter the UK and apply for international protection as is their legal right and, as a result, forces people into the hands of those utterly ruthless people traffickers.

That is the solution and she knows it, but she bats that suggestion off because this is ideological for the Tories. This is who they are.

The world is in the midst of one of the greatest ever displacements of people in our history. A lot of that is, in part, a result of UK foreign policy. The imperial history of the UK has resulted in many of these countries having ties with us through language and previous familial migration.

Yet we take a fraction of the world’s refugees and far less than even our comparator countries in Europe. With an estimated 82 million people forced to flee their homes, is it surprising that a tiny percentage of them should seek to make the UK their home?

The UK Government has had more Cobra meetings about migrants than any other topic except Covid. They want you to think there is some sort of national crisis and to whip up a racist frenzy to provide cover for what are essentially crimes against humanity. The fact is that the number of asylum applications in the UK is just more than a third of what it was in 2002 and asylum seekers made up just 6% of immigrants to the UK in 2019.

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We are being made to believe that this tiny number of desperate people is somehow an impossible task to manage. Are we to believe that the sixth-largest economy in the world can’t possibly accommodate 0.04% of the world’s refugees? Is the Union in such a sorry state economically and morally that it could not accommodate and disperse a number of people equivalent to the population of Irvine across the entire UK?

I no longer want to hear how sorry Tory politicians are to see this happen, I don’t want to hear what France should do or what decisions these people could have made differently. The answer is not to make getting here more difficult, the answer is to make it safer. I want to see a wholesale shift in policy away from plans to push back people on boats and risk drowning them off our coast. I want to see a system that enables people to arrive safely on our shores and live happy, fulfilled lives in our communities.

Common sense should be all that is needed to see that what the UK is doing is contributing to the deaths of innocent people and that it’s only going to get worse if the Nationality and Borders Bill goes through.

Any politician who sees that but still says nothing, or quietly votes alongside their government, is completely lacking in basic human decency. Next week I will write to every Conservative MP urging them to do the right thing. If they don’t, many more of these tragedies lie ahead.