Inside Calais’s official shanty town
New jungle camp, which has no shelter for men and no running water, represents an alarming toughening in France’s treatment of UK-bound migrants
Karim, an Egyptian politics graduate with an admiration for Winston Churchill and “all things British”, had spent days trying to fix up a tent in thorny and windswept scrubland on the site of old rubbish dump in Calais, using bits of plastic sheeting, flimsy branches, a few stones and a wooden pallet.
“This has got to be the worst place I’ve ever seen – it’s not fit for animals,” he said. After rain poured into his tent at night, at 2am he got up and walked, soaking, the four miles (7km) back to his old squat in the centre of Calais, pelted with potatoes from a car whose passenger slowed down and shouted racist abuse.