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.”