The real madness with UK's migrant crisis lies in refusing to act, says STEPHEN POLLARD

It’s amusing, of course. But it is often far more apposite the other way round. All too often we have debates here that feel as though we are cut off from the rest of Europe and ignorant of what is happening there – and often it’s liberal, Left-leaning Eurofanatics who are the worst offenders.

The reaction in advance to Tuesday’s announcement by the Prime Minister of new measures to tackle the small boat crisis is a case in point.

To listen to some of the hysterical comments, you’d think Rishi Sunak was proposing to capsize all the boats and let their occupants perish at sea – and that, for no logical or decent reason, he was planning to close our borders to them all.

The reality is the opposite. Leave aside for a moment the terrible human tragedies in the dangerous Channel crossings.

If you set out to construct a system designed to create unsustainable friction between refugees and residents, you would be hard-pressed to improve on the current chaos, in which ever-increasing thousands of applicants are bussed across the country and housed in hotels and boarding houses in towns ill-equipped for such an influx.

It’s a godsend to the far- Right and does nothing except turn residents ordinarily welcoming and hospitable to refugees into protesters against them.

The PM clearly sees what is obvious to anyone who is not so blinkered that they refuse to acknowledge the obvious: that the only way asylum can now be made palatable to voters is by imposing some limits and control.

The real enemies of refugees are those who pretend everyone is always welcome. Which brings us to Europe. The tenor of most criticism of the Government’s proposals is that they are out on a revolting limb by being unfair on asylum seekers – and uniquely so.

To which the only sensible response is: are you kidding? If you spend even a moment following the debate in Europe you see the same themes, the same ideas, the same impacts and the same plans.

Some of the details, of course, are different. Small boats, for example, do not leave France for Germany or Spain or anywhere else: they leave for Britain.

But in pretty much every European country the debate is much the same. Last month, European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen announced tougher EU-wide rules designed to make it easier to expel asylumseekers whose refugee applications are denied.

As the final document from the 16-hour summit put it, rising irregular immigration is “a European challenge that requires a European response”.

This is how one European news agency described the context of these new EU measures: “The low numbers of failed asylum-seekers being returned to their home countries is a central preoccupation for the EU.

“The bloc already hosts millions of refugees from conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Syria, while facing asylum claims from citizens of safer countries such as Bangladesh, Turkey and Tunisia, many of whom are deemed economic migrants ineligible for asylum.”

You could insert that into a British news report and not have to change a word. So much for the nonsense that Mr Sunak is using this for electioneering, turning asylum into a touchstone issue.

The truth is the opposite – that it is the failure of previous Tory PMs to take serious action that has led to this situation. Further failure would indeed have electoral consequences, but the story is rather that the PM has had no choice but to act, given the scale of the crisis.

Reforms in the EU could also be helpful here. EU leaders agreed, for example, that one country can use a court ruling in another member state to return an illegal migrant to their home country, preventing so-called “asylum shopping” with migrants going to a different country to apply after being turned down in an initial one.

I’d be surprised if we don’t try to work alongside this scheme. Remember this when refugee and human rights groups launch their inevitable attacks on Government proposals: they are treating you as a fool.

They want you to think there is something nasty about controlling who crosses our borders.

They want you to think it’s somehow wrong to impose some order. Don’t fall for it. The real madness lies in refusing to act.