The extraordinary thing is that if the EU had acted from August onwards to stop the refugees landing in Greece and Italy, it could have won praise from the peoples of its member states – even from those loath to support it.

Eight thousand a day landed on Lesbos last week (October 17^th-24^th) in say a hundred boats.  Is it so difficult to make a “wall” of ships in the seas across the routes taken by the people smugglers, and then tow the boats back to their starting points in Turkey and Libya?

Instead of doing this, the European Commission has concentrated on a scheme for distributing this huge stream among the 27 countries participating in its scheme, So far 500 migrants have been distributed, 0.3% of the 160,000 migrants originally allocated to the EU scheme.

The EU response to this low take-up of its scheme is to threaten the 27 countries with huge fines. The EU believe their scheme, having been approved by a single European Council meeting on a qualified majority vote (QMV) basis, is now EU Law (just like that), illustrating once again why so many British people want to leave the EU.

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