A year on from Chancellor Merkel’s big decision, politicians, media stars, celebrities and others continued to insist that Europe must continue to take in the world’s migrants. Those people, including the general public, who continued to question this policy, were repeatedly dismissed as cold-hearted and probably racist. And so even a year after the situation in Europe was agreed to be a catastrophe, the naval patrols in the southern Mediterranean were continuing to pick people up in their thousands. Indeed, according to the EU’s own agencies, the number of migrants arriving into Italy in July 2016 was 12 per cent up on the numbers in July 2015. A year on from what was meant to be the peak, more than ten thousand people were picked up off the North African coastline in just 48 hours. Whenever the media did report these events they described the migrants as being ‘saved’ or ‘rescued’ from the Mediterranean. Most of the time the European vessels simply went ever nearer to the North African shore and picked people up from the boats they had been pushed off in not many minutes earlier. But the implication was really that they were being ‘saved’ and ‘rescued’ from terrible situations that had caused them to set out on the boats in the first place. And as before, none of the details mattered.

Among the absent details was the fact that the flows of migrants into Italy hardly included any Syrians from the civil war. Instead, they were nearly all young sub-Saharan African men. Another point which could have been of some interest was that whatever they were fleeing from was quite possibly no worse than what hundreds of millions of others might wish to flee from in the months and years ahead. Once the migrants had been ‘saved’, the benevolent Europeans who called for this policy to continue lost interest in their newest arrivals. When the 2015 crisis was at its height many individuals in Britain from the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party to the Labour party’s Shadow Home Secretary, with numerous actors and rock stars in between, had said they would take in a refugee family. More than a year later not one of these people had actually done so. As with the generosity and benevolence throughout the crisis, it was easy to expect others to be benevolent on your own behalf once you had signalled that you were on the side of the earth’s poor and oppressed. The consequences of your benevolence could be left to others.