Analysis

By Mary Atkinson

Thirty-nine39 people lost their lives in the back of a lorry parked at an industrial estate this morning.

They leave sisters, brothers, parents and friends who loved them, and whose pain is unimaginable. We may never know the stories of those 39 people, but we should try to.

The scale of the tragedy and the loss of so many human lives in such horrific circumstances has shocked many. Even politicians in charge of our nation’s border policies have expressed surprise and sorrow.

But their shock is disingenuous – these people’s deaths were as inevitable as they were preventable. After all, it’s not as if we haven’t been here before.

Back in 2000, 58 people suffocated to death in the back of a lorry in Dover, on one of the hottest days of the year.

Back then, the politicians expressed shock and surprises at the loss of life, blaming “evil smugglers” for the tragedy.

In the two decades since then, it seems, we have learned nothing.

Instead of providing safe and legal routes into the UK, successive governments have poured millions of pounds into increasingly aggressive border technology, deploying sniffer dogs and heart-beat monitors at the UK’s borders.

Laws restricting entry mean it is now practically impossible to arrive at the UK’s borders without paying thousands to be smuggled into the country – and the more outlandish the control measures at the border, the more risky the routes that people will be forced to use to get around them. The pot of money for high-tech gadgets that criminalise people seeking a better life is seemingly limitless, while the political will for instead providing them safe and legal routes is non-existent.

So today’s tragedy is not the first of its kind – and we need swift action to make sure it is the last. People have always moved, and they always will – whether it’s to reunite with loved ones in the UK, to flee horror and devastation or to seek a better life.

Until the Government ensures that people who do move can do so using safe and legal routes, deaths on this scale will continue –and politicians’ expressions of shock and dismay when they do will ring hollow.

Mary Atkinson is Families Together project officer at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.