BAD weather prevented divers from recovering the bodies from the sunken wreck at Lampedusa.

As I heard the dreadful news about the drowning of so many desperate migrants, I couldn’t help but reflect on the numerous letters I have had which complain, in the same breath, about both immigration and our expenditure on international development aid.

I share the concern of so many of my constituents about immigration: as a relatively small country with an existing housing shortage and already on course to be the most populous country in Europe by 2050, of course we are right to be worried about immigration and seek to control it. I fought three election campaigns on the issue and I am an enthusiastic advocate for the tough new measures the Government has now put in place, which have secured the sharpest fall in immigration since the statistics were first collected.

On the other hand, I am also a staunch defender of our international development budget. We are the first country to meet our treaty obligations on the level of that expenditure and I think that is something about which we should be justifiably proud: We have made it clear we will deal with our own financial problems without reducing our commitment to the world’s poorest people.

What I find odd is that so many of my correspondents do not see the connection between immigration and aid, despite writing about them in the same letter. I see the issues as intimately connected and that the connection is demonstrated in the Lampedusa tragedy. I regard it as vital that we invest in the stability, good governance andprosperity of the world’s poorest and most unstable countries.

This is in order to reduce the strong imperative felt by so many to abandon the countries in which they were born and raised and to seek to start a new life elsewhere.

If I were without any prospects in one of the world’s basket case economies I would feel that very same imperative, indeed I might consider it my duty to my family to go and earn a living elsewhere. It was this imperative that drove those desperate people to their deaths at Lampedusa.

For this reason I consider our international development aid budget as largely an investment in the long-term control of immigration: only by spreading stability and prosperity will we reduce waves of migration.