You would need to be desperate to take your family across the Firth of Clyde in a grossly overloaded inflatable boat. But if your home town was being bombed to smithereens in a brutal civil war, you just might think about it. That’s what is happening in the Aegean Sea. Every day one thousand or more refugees from wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan pay $1,300 a head to Turkish people traffickers for places in overcrowded and unseaworthy boats to cross the five-mile-wide Strait of Mytelini to Greece.

The traffickers gross $52,000 for each load of 40 refugees. A random passenger with no understanding of seamanship takes the helm towards an unknown coast. Not everybody makes it; the world has been horrified by the image of little Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach. The exhausted people I saw scrambling ashore around Efthalou were families using their life savings to pay for a perilous journey, and younger Afghans borrowing from their parents in the hope of earning in Europe to support their families. In many cases these are educated people and all are strivers, taking a risk and keen to work hard to make a fresh start.

The moment of arrival on Lesvos is the only high point in a grim journey. For the first and only time the refugees are welcomed with open arms, kind faces and sustenance by cheering volunteers from Europe and are guided towards reception centres. Ahead lie long ordeals of hostility and obstruction.

The coast is littered with cheap life jackets provided by the traffickers (labelled “does not protect against drowning”) and the remains of countless inflatable boats. The outboard motors and floor panels are retrieved by enterprising Greeks, allegedly for reuse by their Turkish criminal partners.

The Greek authorities have neither the resources nor the will to pay attention to this flood of humanity. In a week, I saw only one policeman on the shoreline. The organisation of the movement of all these refugees and care for vulnerable people is left to an astonishing ad hoc assembly of public-spirited and self-funded volunteers from all over Europe, in loose groupings around the Scandinavian “Drop in the Ocean” and the Dutch “Boat Refugee” organisations.

Two Edinburgh Direct Aid volunteers were welcomed into that activity. As darkness fell I found myself holding hands with a Norwegian actress and a Swedish silversmith in a thin line holding back and trying to calm hundreds of stressed people who had been trying to force themselves onto a bus. None of us had experience of crowd control but a combination of willpower and multi-lingual banter did the trick. Crowds always make a mess, but these people didn’t need to be asked to help bag and bin their rubbish.

There weren’t enough buses and many had to sleep in the open before setting off on a 40km walk to Mytelini in the morning. Nobody complained. They expressed gratitude for what had been done for them and set off on the long march. From Mytelini the refugees have to pay 45 euros for a ferry to Athens, the next step in an epic journey by train, on buses and on foot undertaken in hopes of safety and opportunities to earn a living until the wars come to an end.

Hundreds of thousands have already arrived in northern Europe and some have gathered at Calais. Many more are on their way and the escalating war in Syria will inevitably drive others to flee. They are genuine victims, displaced and traumatised by hideous conflicts, so most would probably satisfy the criteria for asylum. It would be unthinkable to try to compel them to return to a war zone, so the EU is right to look at strategies to let them live and work in different European countries until it is safe for them to return. The failure of the UK Government to agree to take a reasonable share of migrants is shameful.

This embittered old politician was immensely inspired, first by the sincere welcome by so many Europeans of all ages to migrants on the shores of Lesvos, and equally by the response of so many migrants. Some commentators may assume that they are all aspiring benefit claimants, criminals or even terrorists but most seem to me to be people who have taken courageous initiatives to escape from war zones and who are likely to contribute to the economies of countries that take them in.

I suggest that the generosity of so many European volunteers in Lesvos ought to be matched by our governments.

John Home Robertson, Edinburgh Direct Aid volunteer and former Labour MP and MSP for East Lothian. EDA: 0131 552 1545