There have been fifteen times more deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean so far this year than in the whole of 2014.

Migrants who make this hazardous trip do so in rickety, overcrowded, easily capsized boats provided by people traffickers. The migrants come from dozens of countries. On Channel 4 News last night a Gambian migrant in a camp in Sicily told Matt Frei they included Somalis, Gambians, Libyans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and Nigerians. That wasn’t an exhaustive list. They are fleeing war, persecution, human rights abuse and poverty. They are looking for shelter, work, respect. Many of the survivors will head for Germany, Sweden, France and the UK.

In a camp in Calais an unnamed African migrant translated into English what he’d written in French on a whiteboard he’d set up by the roadside:

“We have altogether to learn to live together. Without this we will die altogether like idiots.” (« Nous devons tous apprendre à vivre ensemble … sinon nous allons tous mourir ensemble comme des idiots. »)

Paraic O’Brien asked him, “Why have you written that there?”

“Because”, he said, “I do it [for] people – they thinking we are animals, some people here think we are idiots, but we show the people here … that we are human beings, we are not animals.”

A year ago the coalition government, together with other EU states, decided to replace the search and rescue programme off the coast of Italy with a coastguard service. They did so, they said, because the knowledge that they would be rescued was a “pull” factor on migrants, encouraging them to make the journey. If the programme stopped so would the migration. The migration of desperate people didn’t stop – and the death toll rose: there were about 800 deaths this week.

Jon Snow took advantage of an election interview last night to ask LibDem leader Nick Clegg whether he “regretted” the government’s decision to abandon the search and rescue programme. Clegg replied: “I actually think, funnily enough, with hindsight that was not the right decision …”

I immediately wondered why he said “funnily enough” – I could see nothing funny about the subject or the way the interview was conducted. But, more importantly, he slipped the words “with hindsight” into his answer. Why, I wondered, did he need hindsight? Everyone concerned about the welfare of forced migrants knew it was a wrong decision as soon as it was made, and most of them said so out loud. Why did he need a year’s hindsight?

Anyway, having used hindsight to distance himself from his support of the policy, he then attempted to widen that distance: even if there was a return to the old search and rescue programme, said he, “that still doesn’t provide you with a solution – a European solution – to a very real problem.”

And what was that problem? It was

“thousands of people, in wretched circumstances, travelling huge distances, exiting ports in North Africa in the hands of illegal human smugglers and traffickers, and perishing on the high seas in the Mediterranean.”

So faced with that, what did the leading politicians in our oh-so-advanced European civilisation decide to do? They abandoned desperate migrants and left them to drown.

Jon Snow attempted to get Clegg to take some responsibility for his actions: “The issue is that you supported it, and the consequence is what we are seeing now.”

Clegg took another distancing step away: “No, no, no, that’s a nonsense. The idea that—”

Snow: And let them drown.

Clegg: No, that’s nonsense. I’m afraid—. I’m afraid they were drowning whether you had a search and rescue operation or not. The solution to this is not to be found at sea. That’s the point.

Ultimately, of course, that is the point. There are issues of economic development to be addressed. There is the question of Western support for dictators who keep their people poor and abuse human rights. There is the question of Western arms sales to such states, who then use them on their own people. There is the question of whether Western military intervention is ever a solution to international problems. After all, two of the countries from which the Mediterranean migrants come were invaded (Iraq) or bombed (Libya) by the West, with no thought given to what would happen afterwards. What happened was division, chaos, ISIL and increased forced migration.

But a year ago Clegg and his coalition didn’t address any of those issues. They didn’t even think about addressing them.

They simply decided to leave people to drown. Job done then, eh Nick?