If the Bibby Stockholm isn’t a terrible threat, what’s the point of it?

Grant Shapps insists the government’s solution to housing asylum seekers isn’t a ‘death trap’ – but trying to frighten migrants from crossing the Channel is the only reason it exists, writes Tom Peck

The Bibby Stockholm accommodation barge at Portland Port in Dorset (PA Wire)

The government’s acts of performative cruelty to migrants and asylum seekers serve no practical purpose, they are only meant as a PR exercise, dreamt up by people who actually want to be despised by anybody faintly normal.

Tens of thousands of ayslum seekers have arrived on the Kent coast in small boats already this year. They can’t all be sent to Rwanda. Currently, none of them can be sent to Rwanda, because the policy is illegal, despite its £120m and rising cost.

And they can’t all be stuffed on to overcrowded barges off the Dorset coast, even if the capacity is raised from its intended 200 to 500. When these basic numbers are put to anyone concerned, they will immediately respond by saying that they are not a solution in themselves but a “deterrent.”

All of which makes one wonder whether, before his media rounds on Wednesday morning, Grant Shapps may have read his briefing notes wrong. Why exactly did he claim, several times, that the Bibby Stockholm, the floating barge on which not one asylum seeker has yet been housed for various legal reasons like it not being fit for human habitation, is “not a death trap.”

You what Grant? It’s *not* a death trap? If it doesn’t carry some kind of terrible threat, what exactly is the point? It’s not an actual, viable solution, to any problem whatsoever. It exists only to try and frighten people in to not coming to the country in the first place, and specifically via inflatable dinghies that really are a death trap. Surely Grant Shapps knows the last thing he should be doing is going on the radio and reassuring would be small boat passengers that there is safe accommodation waiting for them when they get here?

Cabinet minister Grant Shapps who has defended the Bibby Stockholm migrant barge (PA Wire)

Shapps’s Bibby Stockholm problem is the same as the government’s wider problem with Rwanda. That it must simultaneously deploy them to try and terrify some of the world’s most desperate people, at the same time as having to reassure people in their own country that Rwanda is a wonderful place, and that the Bibby Stockholm is really quite pleasant.

The problem is that both sets of people can see that both parts of the argument are clearly nonsense. Neither of them make sense on their own, and taken together they’re absurd.

And the problem with this ongoing act of pantomime stupidity, is that it has no choice but to make enemies of anyone who is not stupid. That their plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is illegal, is the fault, we are constantly told of ‘lefty lawyers.’ One of those ‘lefty lawyers’ is Keir Starmer, who had the temerity to spend decades prosecuting criminals and terrorists instead of working for a hedge fund.

When the small boats first started arriving, the government found it had accidentally picked a fight with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, who had somehow wronged their nation by rescuing people drowning at sea. Not so long later, their current enemy is the Fire Brigade, whose officials have pointed out that by putting 500 people on board a barge built for 200, it may not be safe. These concerns, ‘government sources’ have left it be known, are, they reckon, ‘politically motivated.’

There’s a bullet proof logic there. In the last years of his life, the former Harrod’s owner Mohammed Al Fayed became convinced that MI5 had murdered Princess Diana his son. If anyone disagreed with him he had a sharp answer - it was because they too worked for MI5. This kind of reasoning cannot be reasoned with.

And so too, anyone who points out that the government has no plan to deal with the asylum backlog, just an ever more pathetic array of pointless stunts, most of which appear to be illegal, well it’s because they’re lefty lawyers, or woke firemen, or they’re from the ‘blob’ or whatever else.

They don’t mind. They know that having a phoney row is the entire point. Even if they do squeeze 500 people on to a very small barge, where will the other 40,000 go? They’ve given up on finding an actual answer to that question. Far easier, after all, to just demonise anyone who dares to ask it.