Priti Patel is trying to save asylum seekers from danger – by using wave machines to keep them away

The trick to dealing with migrants is to be as hostile as possible, even if that hostility takes up far more resources than being vaguely human

At least Priti Patel has some imagination. Usually when politicians moan about asylum seekers, they say they should “get back to where they come from”, but she’s more spirited and says they should be sent to Ascension Island.

Next week she’ll suggest that as they cross water so often, they should be sent to the second century to be Roman galley slaves, and Jacob Rees-Mogg will add: “This has the advantage of teaching them Latin, which will stand them in good stead for development of their soul.”

The Ascension Island plan was discussed at a “brainstorming session”, so which methods of keeping them at sea were rejected? Her other choices must have been balancing asylum seekers on wind turbines with torches to make cheap lighthouses, retraining them as whales to entertain tourists, and making them swim to Gibraltar and swish the water along to make the North Sea warmer.  

Another suggestion was to “send them to Papua New Guinea or Nauru for processing”, because while we can’t take a few hundred extra people as we don’t have space or resources, Papua New Guinea and Nauru are overflowing with resources they don’t know what to do with.  

Maybe the brainstorming session took place during an episode of Pointless, and whenever an obscure country was mentioned, the brainstormers yelled: “That will do.”

Dominic Raab probably shouted “Magnesium, send them to magnesium”, until Gavin Williamson looked it up and told him it was an element, not a country.

The main objection to welcoming refugees is we can’t afford the cost. So it makes sense that to reduce that cost, we’ve suggested transporting them 4,000 miles away to process their claim. Any family on a tight budget understands this. My mum would often say: “We haven’t any money until the end of the month. So instead of staying in tonight, we’re going to travel four thousand miles to the south Atlantic.”

But refugees and asylum seekers see us as a soft touch. This is why they pay their life savings to cram onto rubber lilos and paddle across the channel using a Toblerone as an oar; they’re expecting us to look after them as they won’t make an effort.

Laura Trott, the Tory MP for Sevenoaks, said we must look at the Ascension Island proposal, because we have to “reduce the pressure” on Kent. Apparently, sending people to Ascension Island is generally the most practical way to do that. When the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch miniature railway gets overcrowded on a sunny day in summer, they get around the problem by getting some passengers to take a miniature schooner to Ascension Island instead.  

It’s true that Kent has extra pressure on it from immigration, because last week it was announced that after Brexit, there could be 80-mile queues of lorries through Kent. This means the population of Kent is set to rise to 35 million, of which 34 million will be Romanian truck drivers stuck on the slip road to the M20. Trott must be furious with whichever government put so much pressure on Kent by causing that.

She’s expressing the central problem with allowing migrants into the country, which is that they add pressure to our overstretched land. For example, thousands of tons of apples have gone rotten this year, because of a lack of foreign labour to pick it. So we can’t afford to let people in who might turn that fruit into food, preventing OUR apples from being infested with proper BRITISH maggots.

Similarly, half the NHS is staffed by immigrants, forcing us to come up with more illnesses to provide them with work.

And we’ve run out of space. This must be why the government has done all it can to give us the worst fatality rate in Europe from the virus, because we’re too crowded and need to lose a few thousand.

The latest proposals that seem to be favourites are using wave machines to keep migrants away, or placing them on oil rigs, or specially bought ferries. 

One problem here is that Nigel Farage will complain, “A FERRY? What’s wrong with sticking them all on a pedalo?”

Because the trick to dealing with refugees is to look as hostile to committing any resources to them at all, even if that hostility takes up far more resources than being vaguely human.

So the government makes statements such as: “To prevent refugees wasting our money, we’ve spent 10 billion pounds on a machine that fires cat-sick at them off the cliffs of Dover.”

Then the opposition to the government often falls into line, so one rule about this discussion is it has to start with: “Obviously we understand the concerns of the British people about immigration.” And that’s fair, because when 40 people who fled a war zone have drifted across sea on a raft made from a packet of Kleenex tissues, the people we must be concerned about are pensioners in Wiltshire with a house they finished paying for in 1987, who fear we’re being invaded because there was a man in a turban on the Antiques Roadshow.

Then they all agree the reason we have to come up with these measures is to stop the refugees making these “dangerous crossings”.

Of course, because Patel is only thinking of the welfare of the people in the boats.

This is why, if your neighbour is fleeing their house because it’s on fire, the last thing you should do is invite them in and give them a cup of tea. That only encourages them. It’s much kinder to set a rabid German Shepherd on them to deter them, while you pour urine on them from an upstairs window and blame them for your own s****y life.