While the politicians debated whether Britain would accept more refugees from Syria, the British public appeared to have decided their help could wait no longer.
A day after shocking pictures were published of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose lifeless body was washed up on a Turkish beach, tens of thousands of people across the country were signing petitions, donating to NGOs, preparing to drive truckloads of supplies to Calais or volunteering to take asylum-seekers into their homes.
Several major charities reported a big spike in calls and emails from people wanting to know how they could help.
“The number is up more than 70% over the past 24 hours,” said Caroline Anning of Save the Children.
“Most want to donate to refugee children: money, or time, or clothes or food. They were such compelling pictures, even when people are familiar with the broader refugee story.”
Anning said the charity was launching a new Child Refugee appeal to channel funds to both its longstanding programmes in Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea and newer ones in Greece and Italy.
“Not just the UK government, but Europe’s leaders have turned a blind eye to this,” she said. “People are now seeing the consequences.”
A spokeswoman for the British Red Cross said it too had received “many more calls” following the pictures’ publication. It was “fair to say that people feel very moved, and maybe also somewhat frustrated”, she said.
The Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), whose independently-run rescue boats in the Mediterranean have saved more than 10,000 lives, said it had seen a 15-fold increase in donations in 24 hours. More than 2,000 people had pledged more than £150,000, compared to a previous record of £10,000, the organisation said.
“People are saying they don’t want to be bystanders any more,” MOAS’s director Martin Xuereb told the Guardian. “We are increasingly understanding that behind every statistic, every number, there is a life – a life who has a mother, a father or a sibling, a grandparent.”
Also responding to the photos, the award-winning children’s writer Patrick Ness collected more than £60,000 in less than five hours after tweeting that he had to do “something to help this refugee crisis” and pledging to match the first £10,000 in donations to an appeal for the charity Save the Children.
Fellow authors John Green, Derek Landy and Jojo Moyes joined him, also pledging to match donations to the tune of £10,000 each. Ness said he launched the appeal partly in response to the “inconceivably feeble response of [the prime minister, David] Cameron and his government”.
Many local refugee appeals have now exceeded their targets many times over. The Coach and Horses pub in Soho set out to raise £5,000 “to give the Calais migrants a decent meal, because British values are about respect, dignity, kindness”; by Thursday night it had a total of nearly £7,000. KentforCalais, a local initiative in Gravesend, asked for £1,000 and got £10,000.
A petition on the official UK parliament website calling on Britain to accept its fair share of refugees and asylum seekers gained more than 100,000 new signatures on Thursday, taking the total to above 200,000 – enough, in theory, to ensure it is considered for debate.
A separate petition on Change.org calling on the home secretary, Theresa May, to give “immediate sanctuary to refugees fleeing war and violence” as a “humanitarian act while their futures are decided” attracted nearly 200,000 signatures in the course of just four days.
Thousands more have pledged to help resettle Syrian refugees and successfully lobbied four local authorities – Glasgow, Birmingham, Kingston and Edinburgh – to give safe haven to at least 50 each.
The initiative, run by community campaign groups Citizens UK and Avaaz, has the backing of more than 2,460 people, including doctors, teachers, social workers, psychotherapists, counsellors and community organisers who have offered practical resettlement support.
Jonathan Cox, the deputy director of Citizens UK, said he had seen “a real shift, a tipping point in terms of political and public mood. David Cameron is on the back foot, you have senior Conservatives breaking ranks and Germany’s actions have put pressure on the UK at an EU level”.
Many other smaller, grassroots groups are already raising money and offering practical assistance to refugees and migrants in Calais. Groups working in the French port say they have been overwhelmed by the number of people arriving from Britain and other European countries with vans and trucks full supplies.
James Fisher of Calaid, which coordinates the storage and distribution of aid to the camp outside the French port, said the organisation was now struggling to cope with the quantities of aid arriving and the number of people wanting to come and volunteer.
“The generosity here has been so massive that we are having to put emergency storage procedures together now,” Fisher said. “Around three or four cars arrive each day filled with aid, the majority from the UK.”
Several hundred groups across Britain are collecting donations and aid supplies; Calais People to People Solidarity, a Facebook group providing a hub for discussion and coordination between the groups, now numbers more than 12,000 members.
Among those using the site, Catherine Beech, from Ashburton in Devon, said she had been amazed by the response she had locally when she and a friend, Janey Smith, appealed for food and clothing for Calais refugees.
“We posted online and now have over £1,000 in donations just from people we don’t even know turning up at our door and saying they are so glad we are doing something,” Beech said, who will be travelling to Calais later this month with sleeping bags, tents, warm clothes, buckets and candles.
“To see all these terrible photos on a daily basis and to know that they are so close, in the places we go on holiday – it’s heartbreaking.”
In Somerset, Frome town council has donated a depot to locals who have launched a campaign for donations of food, clothing and other essentials for refugees in Calais.
Justine Corrie started the campaign two weeks ago in response to the harrowing images coming out of Europe.
“I thought I could mobilise people, but the response has been amazing,” she said. “We thought we’d go with one van, but now it looks like four. It feels like this is a massive public momentum. And it’s really from all walks of life.”
In London, blogger and broadcaster Lliana Bird and writer and presenter Dawn O’Porter are gathering support around the #helpcalais hashtag. Bird said the speed at which donations had poured in had taken her aback.
“I set up an Amazon wishlist so people could pay for sleeping bags or tents, and 1,000 items vanished from it overnight,” she said.
“I thought there was a technical glitch, but then I realised people had actually bought them and they were on their way to us. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t keep the wishlist updated quickly enough.”
Her group has added extra storage in London, she said, with Big Yellow Storage giving them room for free. They are now looking to hire warehouse space in Calais.
Libby Freeman of Calais Action, a pioneer who last month took two white vans with donated tents, shoes and winter clothing to the French port, said people were “driven by the situation and how extreme and desperate it has become”.
She added: “People are angry, and they really do want to help because a lot of them do disagree with the government’s attitude.”
Nick Pascoe of Malmesbury, Wiltshire, summed up the feelings of many. “Three mates and I have just today set up a group and we’ve already got vans sorted and donations coming in – within a day,” he said.
“I’m just fed up with what I see on TV, the negative rhetoric about desperate people. Seeing the drowned toddler was a final straw.
“I have to do something, not just to help make unfortunate people’s lives a little more tolerable but also to disassociate myself from the repugnant image Britain is giving to the world.”