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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now the government has announced it will attempt to bring Syrian refugees to the UK more quickly.  On Wednesday European leaders are going to meet in Brussels for an emergency summit about the crisis and that comes as tensions have been increasing in particular between Hungary and Croatia about how to deal with the influx on their territories. I am joined now by Claude Moraes, the Chair of the European Parliament Home Affairs Committee which is the lead group on refugees, a very good morning to you.  Let’s talk specifically about that mess, that spat we’re seeing between Hungary, Croatia and others, is there any sense you have that this can be sorted out with this summit on Wednesday?

CLAUDE MORAES: Dermot, that speaks to this paralysis, we just can’t go on.  With or without the EU that had to be co-operation.  You remember the 1990s with the former Yugoslavia imploding, you were reporting on that, I remember that and it had to be solved because without co-operation those big numbers at that time, you’ll remember, half a million absorbed by Germany, we absorbed quite a lot from that refugees crisis, also the Kurds and so on.  Without co-operation you can’t get any kind of settlement to this.  There is a lot of debate about how many of them are Syrians and so on …

DM: Yes, there was that statistic that came out from your own stats that only about 20% of them are Syrian.  

CLAUDE MORAES: And Patrick Kingsley from the Guardian analysed that very carefully, came out with a UNHCR figure of 51% but even if you disagree with those figures there is that summer, coming up to winter, of Syrian refugees.  You are tracking the families from there.  The key point is that with these spats, with this disagreement, if on Wednesday, on Tuesday with the Interior Ministers, we don’t get agreement, what will happen without relocation of refugees is that you will get that chaos going up to winter, you’ll get more deaths, more chaos.  The surge is happening essentially because we have winter coming, middle class Syrian families for example are using the rest of their savings to get here, traffickers in Turkey, smugglers, doing all of that so if we don’t solve it on Wednesday, even if it is going to be qualified majority voting that is so undesirable, it is going to be important.  

DM: That really could cause problems.   

CLAUDE MORAES: I know, huge divisions.  

DM: Claude, I just want to get close to the solution as you would see it. Obviously it is not going to be a solution but it would be a better answer than the one that’s being operated now.  Should the message be, we will take as many Syrian refugees as want to come and we will distribute them fairly amongst EU member nations?  

CLAUDE MORAES: It is no longer as simple as that.  The redistribution figures of 120,000 which parliament rushed through last week, these are figures for the beginning of the crisis. What needs to happen now is a proper analysis of who is going to take these people, an honest analysis of that.  There are people who are resisting and they’re not going to do it so we need to find out why they’re not going to do it and ensure that those 22 countries that are willing to do it, do it.  Denmark has opted in, Ireland has opted in and that means that those countries are willing, get on with it by next Wednesday.  This is a human tragedy, a human crisis so we get a situation where we have some organisation compassionately within the EU because at the moment there is just paralysis.  Once that happens then you can calibrate those numbers because Europe is not going to take everyone but we have to have an organised and compassionate …

DM: So you know this question is coming, what do you make of your own country then that has an opt-out, has not opted out because it was never in?    

CLAUDE MORAES: Three countries have a treaty opt-out, Denmark, Ireland and Britain and Britain has taken a view that it opts out.  

DM: But morally, how do you feel to be British?  

CLAUDE MORAES: Well Britain has taken that line, my view of that is it has given huge amounts of international aid and the quid pro quo is it is going to take very few in terms of resettlement.  My view of that is that the international aid is really important, as is sending assets to the Mediterranean.  In terms of the numbers, if it wanted to learn in terms of soft power, showing a lead as Denmark has just done, Denmark has an even tougher opt-out than us but just a couple of days ago said look, we’ll take relocation numbers.  Leadership means also symbolically saying we’ll co-operate to solve this crisis as we did in the 1990s, Britain did it then and we can do it now and I think for that reason we should look at that possibility of co-operating but at the end of the day it needs to be co-operation, that in the end will solve this crisis.  

DM: Interesting talking to you, thanks for your take on it, Claude Moraes very good to see you there, the Chair of the European Parliament Home Affairs Committee.