Whose side are you on in the great Calais crisis?

WE FALL into three camps on the great migrant crisis. Some think those fighting to board UK-bound lorries and trains in Calais are lured here by our State handouts, and must be repelled at all costs. I suspect the majority think along those lines.

Others see them as the tragic human flotsam yearning to build better futures for themselves in Britain, and that we should help them. The Bishop of Dover, the Rt Rev Trevor Willmott, thinks so, saying: ‘We need to rediscover what it is to be human, and that every human being matters.’

Those in the middle sympathise with the migrants, flinch from the harsh, dismissive way in which they’re described, but think we’re already too overpopulated and that this is a problem which must be addressed in the migrants’ countries of origin.

We elect governments in the hope they’ll solve such problems for us, as well as steer between extremes, finding solutions we can live with which don’t impose unacceptable burdens on the rest of us. Neither Tory nor Labour governments have managed to do so with immigration.

Most of all, we trust governments to anticipate such crises in advance, and put together measures which prevent the kind of horrifying scenes we see each night on TV from Calais. Neither the Tory nor the Labour lot have done that, either.

Home Secretary Theresa May says migrants must understand that our streets are not paved with gold. A tired cliché.

But some of those who get here are berthed in £70-a-night hotels. The Government’s own website promises housing and cash to asylum seekers — worth £35,000 a year to couples with children.

Writing about the crisis with her French opposite number interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve — more likely it’s the work of a civil service scrivener — Ms May says: ‘ The nations of Europe will always provide protection for those genuinely fleeing conflict or persecution. However, we must break the link between crossing the Mediterranean and achieving settlement in Europe for economic reasons.’

EASIER said than done, you might think. Ms May adds: ‘We must be relentless in our pursuit of those callous criminals who are encouraging vulnerable people to make this journey in the first place. ‘That is why we are also working closely together to tackle the criminal gangs that are making profit out of people’s misery.’

How many of the ‘callous criminals’ have been caught? The Mail’s Sue Reid was taken by the mayor of Teteghem, near Calais, to a lock-up garage in which 20 cars with UK number plates are stored. They were confiscated from people traffickers, says Mayor Franck Dhersin.

He added: ‘This is a big criminal organisation and the traffickers at the camp have guns and knives. They get furious when the police lift their cars onto a transporter and take them away. But the officers have guns, too, and threaten to use them if the gang members are violent.’

‘Get furious’ when their cars are taken? ‘Threaten police with their guns and knives’? If they threaten the police with guns and knives, how do they avoid arrest and prosecution?

Despite Ms May’s attempt to persuade us that the UK and French governments have matters under control, the migrant crisis at Calais is something else altogether.

Don’t the anarchic scenes remind you of post-nuclear war films, like Mad Max, where all civil order has broken down?

All such crises usually give way in the end to other alarms and excitements. But given the way of the world now, with so many thousands determined to migrate, this will be a recurring problem.

The end of great empires has given way to an era of looser world governance, in which the possession of weapons combined with the adoption of religious piety (Islam at present, but why not Catholicism or Protestantism tomorrow?) is considered enough to establish a new nation or caliphate ruled by a supreme religious or political leader.

A result is great displacements of poor-but-mobile people, dispersed into a world in which the great democracies must work out what on earth to do about them. Result: nightly struggles at Calais as many of them seek to get to England.

How should we react? ‘ Keep Calm and Carry On’ — the government’s advice in 1939 — is currently the only offer.