Nearly five years ago now I was awoken by a phone call from Thurrock’s local borough Police commander.
She advised that emergency services had taken a call from a lorry driver who reported unconscious people in his trailer.
On attending the scene, they found 39 people all deceased.
Sadly, this incident was not as shocking to me as it was to others. As the Member of Parliament representing busy docks in Purfleet and Tilbury at the time, I was aware of the permanent hazard of people entering the country illegally in the backs of lorries.
I remember hearing of an Iraqi family who were found in a container on Christmas Eve. Had the supervisor not persuaded the team to do one last search before breaking off for the Christmas holidays, that family would have perished. In August 2014, 35 Afghan Sikhs were found in a container in Tilbury. One had died.
You don’t have to be rocket scientist to understand the hazards of being locked in a sealed container.
It is a six-hour crossing from Zeebrugge to the North Bank of the Thames. The risk of being starved of oxygen are high. It takes a particularly callous, cruel and evil person who will take advantage of the desperation of people’s hopes and dreams.
They are nothing but cash paying cargo. They care nothing for their lives. This activity is a crime against humanity.
There has been a lot of success in tackling the trafficking by container. But these criminal gangs are enterprising. Hence the arrival by small boats. An altogether more visible method of illegal migration. The sight of which has fuelled outrage.
But just look at those boats. Look at the numbers of people on them. Look at how many people die by trying to make that journey. Not just by drowning but being trampled as desperate people care not how they climb aboard or disembark.
But there is a reason why these desperate souls put themselves in the hands of the evil criminals that exploit them. It is because they believe that once they arrive in the UK, they will not be removed.
And it isn’t difficult for them to reach that conclusion. They will probably have friends and acquaintances already here telling them how if only they get here what they can do to make sure they stay.
But don’t be fooled that the reason Britain can’t remove them is all because of the ECHR. Over the fourteen years I was a Member of Parliament I saw numerous people come to me with unresolved applications and some of them really ought to have been removed. It seemed like out of sight out of mind on the part of the Home Office.
The same behaviour can be seen with the housing of asylum seekers in hotel accommodation.
The hotels are glad of the regular income, the middleman gets a nice commission and as the Home office no longer must worry about where to house them.
There doesn’t seem to be much hurry in resolving the asylum claim.
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There is only one way to tackle the Britain’s position as the illegal immigration capital of Europe. And that is to tackle the Home Office.
No point at all in bright ideas like Rwanda. No point at all in a phony war against the ECHR.
It is down to good old fashioned operational efficiency and the leadership of Ministers who are prepared to give direction to the Whitehall machine about what they expect.
That and getting to grips with fighting the criminal gangs that are engaged in this despicable trade.
11 people were sentenced in British courts for a total of 117 years for their part in the deaths of the 39 and a further 19 were convicted in Belgium. Convictions were also secured in the case of the trafficked Afghans. With real leadership, it can be done. And must be.