Our town has a tradition that we know goes back 500 years, but it probably goes back way longer than that. The same tradition that so many coastal towns, especially small-boat fishing towns have. When people are lost at sea, we gather on the beach to send them a final salute, to just stand still, and think of them as people – just in case it helps in some way.

In our town, it’s usually fishermen that are lost at sea but sometimes, the deaths have been due to war or piracy, occasionally some stupid accident. In recent years, it’s usually asylum seekers, who’ve taken the desperate decision to try and cross the busiest shipping lane in the world in an inflatable dinghy, because they saw no other hope, and no-one would let them onto a proper boat.

The thing about the men we gathered to think about today was, they were from Afghanistan. We know six men died. In truth, we know more than twice that number did but if they don’t find the bodies, they don’t count, officially, as deaths at sea. Well, the thing about the gatherings is to do the dead the honour of thinking of them as people.

Tonight’s vigil was for people who’d faced the certainty of a horrible death, because the Taliban were after them. They’d managed to make their way across land, across however many guarded borders there are between Afghanistan and Calais, all the way to the Channel coast and there, their luck ran out. Afghan asylum seekers are allowed to come to the UK but, according to our government, these men came the wrong way. It remains unclear what exactly the right way is, and how on earth such people are supposed to know about it, and access it.

Given the numbers that gather in Calais, you’d think our government would have the sense to take up the offer France has made to set up a British processing centre on French soil, where they can meet these people, work out who they are, how they’re supposed to enter the country, then see that they can do so safely but no, this pathetic bunch of MPs we have would rather jump up and down making Westminster speeches saying “stop the small boats!”

And so, after all their efforts, and after so many miles across land, those men died in the channel this weekend. We gathered this evening to look out to sea and think about them.

On the way home, I found myself also thinking about us – that we have a government (and an official opposition) who let this happen. If they’d do it to Afghan people, for the sake of a slogan (Stop the small boats!) I think they’d just as soon do it to us.

What happened in the channel off Hastings this weekend was what the government wanted to happen. Those horrible deaths are supposed to be held up as ‘a deterrent’.

Do you think it’s unreasonable of me, to think our politicians wanted those men to die? If you do, please consider this: there were political points to be won by bringing Ukrainian refugees here, re-homing and celebrating them, so the government had an online asylum application system set up, and brought them here safely. I think they could just as easily do that for Afghan and other peoples, but they’ve nothing to gain by that, so they just use their deaths to add colour to their ‘stop the small boats’ campaign.

Well, I have another slogan.

Let’s stop these heartless politicians.

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