A 15 month old baby. I swear if anyone else tries claiming people making these journeys aren't "genuine refugees" I will lose it. Iran persecutes people and creates refugees. You don't make a trip like this with a baby if you think you have other options. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54717137

"They could have stayed in France". What? Where they can be beaten up by the police? Denied rights? Germany, yeah those 1,600 attacks against asylum seekers last year give the country a really safe feeling. Spain. Who doesn't like being forced to sleep on the streets in winter?

What are we doing? Decades we've focused on deterrence and exclusion and we know it doesn't do anything. Resettlement schemes are minimal in grand scheme. Other, safer, routes are closed. We could, even just for the pandemic, be doing something more than....than making it harder.

Traffickers and smugglers help cause these deaths. They don't give asylum seekers a say in the conditions which they are taken across the channel in, but our failure as a country, for years, helps keep fuelling the need for people to rely on them.

We could do so much more. Process applications in France, issue humanitarian visas, hell, fulfil existing obligations by not voting to prevent kids being reunited with family members. Instead, what do we do? Threaten to use nets to catch them and make the journey more dangerous.

I am so tired of this. There are so many people you can lay the blame for this at the feet of, but how can this government not accept that it has to shoulder some of that blame, and by God if/when more people die they can't claim they are "doing everything they can".

All people want is to find some safety and peace of mind. That's it. Is that too much to ask? A family, children, died for the hope of being safe. They died trying to escape persecution. They died cold and scared, for the "crime" of wanting to be safe. What are we doing?

You know what? Tomorrow the news will roll on and most people will forget. There'll be another story, another outrage. Some people may think about it a bit, but most will move on. The families and friends of those who died can't though. These are people, and...what are we doing?