This migrant barge is a feeble response to a global challenge

Editorial: ‘Bibby Stockholm’ is a piece of performative politics that distracts from the wider problem of growing worldwide migration

The first migrants entering the ‘Bibby Stockholm’ on Monday (PA)

Bibby Stockholm, the accommodation barge that will eventually hold around 500 refugees, will make no measurable difference to the migration crisis. The numbers involved are tiny in relation to the roughly 45,000 irregular migrants who crossed the English Channel last year.

Grim as some say the conditions on board are, they are unlikely to be horrific enough to serve as a significant deterrent to anyone fleeing for their lives, or even economic migrants looking for work and an opportunity to transform their existence. The chances of anyone embarking from the French coast on a dinghy ending up moored on this modern-day hulk off the coast of Dorset are vanishingly small.

Indeed, much the same could be said of the various other government schemes to house the 74,000 people already in the country and awaiting processing. Former military barracks; shanty town-style tent settlements; deportation to Rwanda or, now rumoured, the minute mid-Atlantic islet of Ascension – all utterly unsuitable and all signs of a government desperate to be seen to be doing something, or anything, no matter how ineffective.