Welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. On this week's episode, we'll be looking at the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and how NGOs might be making things worse rather than better. We'll also be wondering whether Bristol should be ashamed of its past and discussing binge drinking with Julie Birchall. First up, fewer than 300 miles off the Libyan coast lies the Italian island of Lampedusa.

With a population of over just 6,000, Lampedusa has become the nexus of a migration crisis that has rumbled on for years, with seemingly no resolution in sight.

In this week's magazine, Nicholas Farrell reports

from Italy on a crisis that he thinks is being compounded by boats run by NGOs, bringing migrants

ashore in Italy. To discuss this issue and what can be done about it, I'm joined by Douglas Murray,

author of The Strange Death of Europe, and George Graham, director of humanitarian policy at Save the

Children. So we're coming up to two years since that heartbreaking image of Aylan Kurdi,

the three-year-old Syrian boy who was photographed dead on a beach in Turkey.

And that was on the front page of all the newspapers around the world.

George, has there been a quieting of interest since then in the situation for refugees?

At that point, there was this huge and really quite astonishing, sort of upsurge of interest. And then since then people have digested

the reality of what it means to have some of these big conflicts like Syria and Iraq so close to

Europe. I wouldn't say there's been a quietening of interest, but just further reflection on how

to address it. And we continue to find our supporters very keen to donate to our work to protect

vulnerable child refugees and child migrants, but not just in Europe across the routes. I mean,

we work in the countries where people are coming from and really across those routes.

There's still quite a high level of interest, but I think that was a peak, yes. Are there still as many more people coming across trying to make the

crossing? Well, it's changed since then, so back then it was all about people coming to Greece

from Turkey. That route has quietened a lot. There's still a big problem in Greece with lots

of people effectively stuck in Greece in

really pretty bad conditions. But now, obviously, we're looking at people trying to cross

from North Africa in the Central Mediterranean, which actually was the pattern before 2015.

...