'Bunch of migrants' - just another opportunity for inter-party sniping?

Why didn't Europe step in when they could see what was happening.
Let me think. Could it be that Germany needs/ wants migrants ? After all they took 100s of 1,000s of Turks to work in their car industry. Now that population is ageing and they need more. But not any Tom, Dick or Harry. They will sort the wheat from the chaff and the rest can do what they will.

We could do with more facts and less emotion. I'm sure that, somewhere among them, there are people that we could do with here, not least medics. But couldn't those medics, with a bit of support, be helping to care for the cold, exhausted and starving in holding camps while those fit, young men are trained up for the army and given weapons to recover their own country?

It's too late now, but couldn't they have been given more help nearer to home? Obviously Greece couldn't do much alone, but wouldn't it have been in the interests of the rest of Europe to go and meet the problem, as soon as the extent of it was understood, rather than watch it spread across Europe? Or is that too simplistic - they would have smashed their way through to the Lands of Milk and Honey anyway? Was Viktor Orban (Hungary) right or wrong?

The defence budget has been cut to the bone but foreign aid is up. Then we hear that much of the money given in foreign ends up syphoned off to who knows where.

There is certainly a danger of being too kind, and seeing a backlash as a result.

We all have our "Why can't they" questions but there's nothing constructive coming back, presumably because the Government knows that we won't like the answers.

Nonnie. It is Sweden. They have always been the most generous country to migrants ( per population) but now, the 'poor' migrants have seen their vulnerability and are taking the piss.

I think that those in France are the responsibility of the French. If there are so many unaccompanied children living in the camps then what do we think of the French for allowing it?

I have said all along that it is better to help people to live near their own homes so they can eventually go back and I'm glad that we are taking refugees from there rather than encouraging the criminals who are sending them over in boats. On the radio yesterday there was a discussion about a country that takes in all unaccompanied children and they all claim to be 17 or under. That gives them a year to be processed and then when they are 18 they can bring in their families. Was it Denmark or Sweden? Surely it makes sense to give help in a way which doesn't encourage criminals.

Agree ( ducks down behind parapet again)

The judge who granted asylum to the 3 'children' living in the Calais camp stated that the majority of people in the French camps are NOT refugees but only want the benefits that they can get here. Thank god there's one who's in the real world. Shame he's a bit of a lone voice.

Very true Bagatelle.
The contempt that Cameron showed was clearly for Corbyn and Co. And not towards migrants.Those mainly young men from all sorts of countries waiting to get here at Calais are not refugees or asylum seekers but economic migrants wanting to get into 'the land of milk and honey' which is the UK.
France is a perfectly safe place for them to apply to live, and the French should be processing claims and either accepting them or deporting them, but no doubt find it cheaper to allow them to live in camps, and now and then vanish onto the trains to England.

hildajenniJ It would be lovely if we could take them all in, love them, see them happy and on the road to good, fulfilled lives. So who is going to do it? I have friends who foster children and I know that I wouldn't be up to it. These are traumatised children. I wish I knew the answer, or that someone, anyone, knew the answer.

Re the mud-slinging, politicians have to be thick-skinned. What bothers me most is the game that they make of it. (I've just deleted a rant about Jess Phillips (Labour) on QT the other night.) It worries me that emotion is getting in the way. Who are we to know about war?

Words from those who attained high office in the armed forces and as peace keepers through aptitude, training and experience appear in the Opinions sections of the Press from time to time, but they don't get enough airing for the information of those who don't read the papers.

Politicians, on the other hand, get elected by saying what the public wants to hear. "You can have everything for nothing - just vote for meeeee!" Most of them probably went into politics for the right reasons. The rot set in when they started televising PMQs, which has degenerated into a floor show.

The contempt in his voice, as Bags has already pointed out, was directed at Corbyn and Co.

It wasn't so much the words 'bunch' as the contempt in his voice that bothered me.
Meanwhile on Bakeoff his wife was bemoaning the fact that she usually only gets bouquets because she is his wife. Diddums!

I'm quite happy with taking migrants from the refugee camps in and around Syria. Countries on the borders of Syria are overwhelmed by refugees. One example is Jordan where refugees now account for 20% of the population.
Those minors who have relatives here who will accept responsibility for them could easily be accepted.

If Dave dislikes migrants so much, how come we deport so few?

I read this the other day: Don't rescue to the extent that YOU have to be rescued.
And is it fair that Kent social services are sending our own children all over the country because of the amount of immigrant children being sent there?

hildajenniJ "David Cameron does not want Britain to accept 3000 migrant children." What exactly would happen to them if they came? There aren't enough foster homes for all the children that need them now, and thousands are in care homes with poor prospects.

Quite sure it was a deliberate wind-up too.

Who cares? It's only a word

Political nuance or, as the OP suggests, "inter-party sniping".

Below is a fuller quote than most media have given. According to the article in the Telegraph pointing it out, what Cameron said was an attack on Corbyn's Labour, not migrants. If this is true, it does put a slightly different slant, and some 'political nuance', on the use of that particular phraseology.

It's worth quoting what he said in full. "The idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in that regard is laughable," he told MPs. "Look at their record over the last week. They met with the unions and they gave them flying pickets, they met with the Argentinians and they gave them the Falkland Islands, they met with a bunch of migrants in Calais and said they could all come to Britain - the only people they never stand up for are the British people and the hardworking taxpayer."

It has been widely reported that Cameron deliberately said 'bunch of immigrants' so that there would be a storm of controversy, so that the news about the Google tax affair would be buried. Apparehtly this is an old trick of Lynton Crosby - use a less damaging piece of news to bury a more damaging.

I know that I may well be shot down in flames for this, but here goes:
David Cameron does not want Britain to accept 3000 migrant children. He calls himself a Christian so let me quote a verse from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 19 : verse 14, "suffer the little children to come into me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven".
I started singing " When mother's of Salem their children brought to Jesus" at work this morning and dissolved into tears as I thought about what my mother would have said about all this. She was very compassionate towards the disadvantaged, particularly children, and would have been horrified by the Prime Minister and his attempts at limiting our intake of these poor people.