THEY were French waters, but the destination was England. The loss of 12 lives in the Channel on Tuesday — one a pregnant woman, six of them minors — requires a response from the British Government. This response should certainly involve closer co-operation with the countries through which the migrants travel, and the new Government’s warmer relations with the European Union ought to facilitate that. Thwarting the traffickers who prey on human need must be one objective, but a more important one is tackling that human need. The present Government might be more inclined than the last to address this issue — but to persuade it to commit funds to the task will require public pressure, and the public is far from being persuaded. Of course, thousands of people are involved in supporting and nurturing asylum-seekers, and events such as the tragedy on Tuesday will tug at more heartstrings. But anti-migrant feeling has been allowed to fester, so that a Northampton childminder can post a call on X for hotels housing asylum-seekers to be set on fire. “If that makes me a racist, so be it.” Perhaps she will not be so stoic when it makes her a prisoner, a likely outcome when she appears in Birmingham Crown Court in October.

At another border, on the other side of the Atlantic, a BBC documentary, America’s New Female Right, featured Christie Hutcherson, who founded Women Fighting for America. In her view, expressed widely on various right-wing channels, the people attempting to enter the United States from Mexico were “probably from terrorist organisations, trained now with the cartels”. It was, she explained, part of a plan to collapse society. What is of particular concern is that many of the women in the documentary cited their Christian faith as the grounding for their views and actions. Ms Hutcherson’s mission to harass migrants began when she heard a male voice in her backyard. “It was God’s voice,” she said, and God told her to go to the border and spend time there with “an elite force”. While Ms Hutcherson was recording her inflammatory views on her phone for her online platform, the BBC interviewer actually spoke to one of the migrants, Christian from Chad, and asked why he was attempting to reach the United States. He replied in broken English: “They have droits de l’homme. They respect the people.” Ms Hutcherson was doing her best to disprove that.

The revolutionary act of St Paul and the early apostles, based on the words of Christ, was to found a universal religion. It is a faith that embraces people in the United States, Chad, Northampton, and on the French coast. And it is hard to believe how a follower of Christ can be mistaken about his message to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison . . . and take in the stranger.