Madness in the Med

Following the EU’s deal with Turkey over people smuggling, the issue of migrants trying to cross, and quite often drowning in, the Mediterranean has largely disappeared from the British media. There have been no more images like that of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach after the rubber dinghy in which his family were trying to reach the Greek island of Kos capsized in August 2015.

Now, people smugglers and migrants know there is little point in trying to make the crossing from Turkey to Greece because they will only be sent back, in return for the EU taking refugees directly from camps in Turkey. The deal has successfully curtailed the activities of criminal gangs operating in the eastern Mediterranean: in the first six months of this year arrivals in Greece had fallen by 93 per cent compared with a year earlier.

But the problem hasn’t gone away; it has shifted westwards to Italy, where things just go from bad to worse.