The Spectator podcast is brought to you by Barry Brothers and Rudd.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on this week's episode we'll be discussing whether aid is working.

We'll also be talking about what David Cameron is or isn't up to these days.

And finally, we'll be discussing the joys of being trolled.

First up, the Syrian refugee crisis has been the great tragedy of our times. But our global system

for aiding refugees dates from the 1940s, so no wonder it's broken, says Paul Collier in this week's

issue of The Spectator. He joins me now, along with Kevin Watkins, the CEO of Save the Children.

So, Paul, in your piece, you say that we need to have heads supported by heart when we deal with

refugees. What do you mean by that?

Well, I mean, it's a really big problem. There's desperate people, millions of them.

And so that pool of desperate people, of course, invites our compassion, the heart, but because it's a

big challenge, that compassion has to be guided by the best we can do with our heads as well.

We've got to be compassionate and we've got to be smart. That's the heart allied with the head.

And frankly, Europe's response to the Syrian crisis, for the first four years Europe basically sat on its hands.

And so it was heartless. And then for about three months, it opened doors but had no means of getting to Europe

so that was kind of all heart and no head and now there's a danger that we're kind of back to

not very much heart so it's been a dismal an entirely entirely avoidable story. Refugee problem is a sufficiently contained problem

that if the world puts its mind and its heart together on this, we can crack it.

And Kevin, in the piece, Paul suggests that temporary humanitarian support in the form of camps

isn't really fit for the 21st century any longer.

Do you think that's a fair assessment?

Well, I think the article makes a really important point, which is that the architecture for dealing with the refugee crisis, not just in Syria, but globally.

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