Asylum seekers are dying in British ports. It’s time we looked after them properly.

The tale is now familiar: shouts are heard from inside a freight container and police are called. A cargo of human beings is discovered, some gravely ill. This happened last Sunday along the Thames at Tilbury docks. Thirty-five Afghans were discovered. One of them, Meet Kapoor, was already dead. Days later, 15 Kashmiris and Eritreans were found on a lorry pulled over in Somerset, dehydrated but alive. Dozens of people are now being found each week in these kinds of circumstances.

It is not just economic migration: the Afghans found in Essex were Sikhs, for example, a group singled out for repression under the Taleban. Once they must have hoped that a stable government would emerge in Kabul, allowing for the return of the 1.4 million Afghans still in exile. But this did not happen, and Britain and America are pulling out, leaving a weak government. The Taleban is now so strong that it is focusing its attentions on Pakistan (and killing policemen in Karachi). Meanwhile, the jihadists in the so-called Islamic State are telling Christians to convert or face the sword.

Had police found Romanian stowaways in Essex, they could have been deported immediately, the case treated as pure criminality. But those on the run from religious persecution are a different matter: Britain has an obligation to protect them. That so many risk their life for the chance to start at the very bottom in a country like Britain is a humbling reminder of the privileges and liberties that we can so often take for granted. But it is also a reminder of our obligation to grant asylum towards the persecuted. It is an obligation that the coalition government keeps strangely quiet about.