It took Boris Johnson 1,066 days, Rishi Sunak 603 days, but the grand prize goes to Sir Keir Starmer, who in a record smashing 401 days - welcomed his first 50,000 asylum seekers across the English Channel. Despite his repeated promises…
Tonight Sir Keir Starmer stands there helpless, like a modern day King Cnut, commanding the tide bend to his will only for the water levels to rise ever higher. No longer lapping at his feet - now with the real potential of engulfing him whole.
More than 1,500 have arrived in the last six days alone. Each and every migrant a new demand on the taxpayer. For an often air conditioned hotel room. For a weekly stipend on a government debit card to spend wherever they fancy. All paid for by you.
Tom Harwood has reacted to shocking small boat figures
|GB NEWS
To deny the pull factors lavishly laid on through our taxes, is to deny reality.
Take the testimony of one asylum seeker interviewed on BBC Newsnight just in December. Amazingly, he said the quiet part out loud. "I had Asylum in Greece, but nobody wants to live in a tent".
Yes, that’s right. He paid €3,000 to instead come to Britain. Not for asylum or safety, but because he didn’t like his tent.
So why is our hotel system so gold plated, and so little replicated?
Take Greece, where asylum seekers are housed in tent-based settlements.
Or take Germany, where initial camp based reception centres can house asylum seekers for up to 24 months.
For many other countries, designated accommodation has simply not kept up with demand.
In France, only two of the last ten years saw reception capacity meet housing demand. A far cry from Britain's hotel-requisitioning overcapacity.
Keir Starmer | PA
And in Italy fully half of all users of homeless shelters are asylum seekers.
While homeless asylum seekers are a relatively rare sight in Britain, they are a common part of life in European countries.
Why the disparity?
We can trace it back to 1999, when Tony Blair’s Immigration and Asylum Act made clear British taxpayers are on the hook for providing accommodation. In the years since, judicial reviews have mandated ever higher minimum standards, leading to costly hotel use.
Cheaper solutions face legal challenges. The sort of accommodation offered by Greece is undoubtedly illegal under the modern interpretation of Blair’s Immigration and Asylum Act.
If the government was looking for a hard nosed PR win, they could do a lot worse than amending the minimum legal standards for asylum seeker accommodation. Hotels are not the only pull factor. But they are undoubtedly a sign of the lack of control and mixed messaging put out by subsequent governments.
So is Kemi Badenoch right when she says asylum seekers should be housed in 'Nightingale' camps, rather than plush hotels? And why didn’t the Tories pursue this when they were in power?