INSIDE a week, our dear Prime Minister has gone from a response to the Calais-Dover crisis saying first, “My heart goes out to holidaymakers” to “This is an incident of international importance and we are on the case.”

The case is this: tens of thousands of the North African middle class are spending their life-savings to pay unscrupulous people-traffickers to get them into Europe; thence to France where they are not welcome; so to Britain via Calais in search of not just a better life but of any life at all.

I don’t blame them. If I were an African in a hell-hole created by the violent Islamic insurgency which is raging across three continents, I would want to get myself and my family out of it as soon as possible. Most of the people trying to escape to Britain are not scroungers, but qualified, able and competent to make a contribution to our national life.

But there’s a limit and a net immigration total of 250,000 a year is preposterous and ruinous.

You know very well that I’m no great fan of the BBC, but hats off to a recent File on Four programme which stated quite unequivocally that our borders are porous and we have no idea how many foreigners are flooding in. That quarter of a million figure is almost certainly an underestimation.

You’ve seen the rows of lorries. I pity those poor drivers holed up there on the hard shoulder for days on end. But that’s almost a side issue. The stacking pile-up in the approaches to the channel ports is costing the economy of Kent in excess of £1.5 million every day. And it’s not just the holidaymakers, Dave: because of the snarl-ups, communications by road in Kent are well-nigh impossible. Businesses are going bust and social life is paralysed. The shambles also causes serious damage to our national economy as firms are not able to transport their goods for export .

Then there is the much wider issue of social order. French trades unionists are lighting their bonfires of tyres and doing all they can to prevent a proper policing of Calais. Typically, the French police do nothing to impede them.

Not that the perfidious French care about this very much anyhow; they would far rather the migrants’ problem was Britain’s than theirs. Spare a thought in passing for those attempting migrants who die in their struggle to cross the channel.

Dave says he will “do all it takes to resolve this problem”. It’s been going on for ages. Why hasn’t he done anything already?

He promises more fencing and sniffer dogs. It’s as if, at the height of a cholera epidemic, the chief medical officer should propose its alleviation by a couple of aspirins.

The root of the matter is, of course, that thing we are not allowed to mention: the violent Islamic insurgency on three continents. Those desperately trying to escape North Africa are not doing so because they fear “a few hotheads and lone wolves” or “an evil ideology”. They are the victims of a conflict between civilization and barbarism which extends from West Africa to Bangladesh. This is what must be confronted and beaten down. Let alone beat it down, the West is not even prepared to admit that it exists.

Because we are not prepared to take decisive action against those who wish us harm, we are willing catastrophe upon ourselves. That is the big picture behind the stacked lorries, the gridlock, the economic disaster and the cancelled wedding receptions in Kent.