France sees Channel migrant deaths as a problem of Britain’s making

In the UK, officials have been quick to focus on – and to condemn – the smuggling gangs. Each incident, each death, is seen as the result of cynical criminal activity. Which, of course, it is.

Once again, the smugglers crammed far too many of their paying clients into what appear to be increasingly flimsy boats, with nowhere near enough life jackets.

Here in northern France, the police have a similar focus. They are preoccupied with the task of trying to patrol ever larger stretches of their increasingly militarised coastline. They now have more manpower, buggies, night-vision equipment, and special drones that can detect groups of migrants hiding in the dunes.

But the police are aware that, as they expand their operations – much of it now funded by British taxpayers – the smuggling gangs are responding, finding new ways to cross, and often putting the migrants themselves at ever greater risk as a result.

The gangs now launch their boats inland, from canals, or way down the French coast, meaning far longer journeys to cross a busy stretch of water crowded with commercial shipping and tugged at by powerful tides.

The gangs pack more people inside inflatable boats of ever more dubious quality – sometimes 90 people in a boat designed, or barely designed, to hold 40. It’s a problem exacerbated as the authorities succeed in disrupting the supply of boats brought to the coastline from deep within Europe.

And, increasingly, the smugglers use violence too. Stones hurled at police on the beaches. Sometimes knives brandished too.