OTHER VOICES

The Jungle, a sprawling migrant camp in northern France that had come to symbolise Europe’s dismal failure to cope with the waves of desperate people fleeing violence and hunger in the Middle East and Africa, is finally gone, cleared in a three-day French operation that will disperse the migrants and refugees among centers across France. But the greater problem that brought them there in the first place is far from cleared.

Razing the tawdry, unsafe and unhealthy camp in Calais was overdue and necessary, and the thousands of people will now have a chance at least to live in a degree of safety while they try to get permission to stay in France.

But the Somalis, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians and others who have risked everything to flee their hellish lands are still arriving in a continent that still has no unified, humane policy to deal with them. That the Jungle existed in the first place testifies not only to their desperate resourcefulness, but to Europe’s fecklessness... Britain has now taken a commendable step under a measure known as the Dubs amendment, named after a peer who was himself a child refugee, to let in unaccompanied refugee youths, of whom there were about 1,300 in Calais. Britain should go further and demonstrate that even if it is leaving the EU, it still recognises its obligations to refugees and to its neighbours... However competently it was done, clearing Calais only a temporary measure.

Clearing the jungle in Calais