‘Small boats week’ and the Bibby Stockholm barge have sent a clear message to voters

It is hard to conceive of any way in which “small boats week” could have gone any worse. It was meant to be a concerted PR push by the government to focus attention on its campaign to what it likes to call “stop the boats”. It has, instead, been a many-layered, multi-faceted and non-stop advert for all the myriad ways in which the policy, which is itself a failure as a concept, is nevertheless failing on its own terms, and for which no one but the government is to blame.

The week began with much to-ing and fro-ing over how many asylum seekers would be cleared to board the Bibby Stockholm, a barge the government has bought for no reason other than it will attract attention, and which it had hoped to overcrowd with asylum seekers.

It had involved one would-be “passenger” being told to board anyway, despite having tuberculosis, a decision that has been described by a doctor involved in the process as a “potential public health catastrophe”. And it has ended, on Friday afternoon, with the small number of passengers on board being evacuated after legionella was discovered in the water supply.

There have been almost countless humiliations along the way. One of the asylum seekers was mocked, after their lawyer declared them to be “scared of water” – the mocking deriving from said person having not been afraid to arrive by small boat. The government also pointed out that said person had not even arrived by small boat, thus winning a very pointless public battle but undermining the entire point in the first place.

It has now been revealed, by The Independent, that almost none of the Bibby Stockholm’s passengers arrived in the UK via small boat, which account for a small fraction of asylum claims in the first place.

The primary purpose of the policy is that the threat of being placed on a barge, or deported to Rwanda is, by the government’s own calculation, supposed to act as a deterrent. It is not in itself a real or meaningful solution. But its carefully planned out publicity drive has caused it to reveal that a maximum of two small boat arrivals have been assigned to said barge, and none have been deported to Rwanda.

In order to deport more, but no more, as things stand, than a maximum of 200 a year, the government is threatening to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights, which no country has ever done voluntarily, and would cement the UK’s reputation as a country that has gone more than a little bit mad.

At the very height of small boats week, when the deterrent effect is at its highest, hundreds more asylum seekers have arrived via small boat, prompting lifeboat dispatches into the Channel and the crashing of a £420,000 Home Office drone. It is a level of farce that could scarcely have been scripted better.

Moreover, government ministers going on the news channels have found their policy so indefensible they have lost arguments with themselves. Robert Jenrick has claimed that actually the only viable solution to the problem – namely, to process asylum claims faster – would just encourage more people to come, whilst simultaneously bragging about how he has personally sped up the process.

The policy is meant to be a deterrent, yet government ministers still praise Rwanda as a wonderful place to go and build a life. Right-wing MPs and columnists have sought out iPhone footage of life on board Bibby Stockholm and complained that asylum seekers are “filling their bellies” with breakfasts while millions of children elsewhere in the country live in poverty. It was, one has to assume, not the government’s plan for the Bibby Stockholm to end up being compared favourably to life in Britain generally, by their own supporters.

Voters can see very easily that the arrival of thousands of people a year at beaches in Kent on inflatable dinghies is a serious problem, and they want something done about it. But they can also see straight through a government that has no idea what to do, and which bears responsibility for the problem having become as serious as it is.

They understand that when the government talks about the scary amount of money spent on keeping asylum seekers in hotels, some £6m a day, they are not unaware of who has been running the country for the past 13 years. Nor are they unaware of how and why things have arrived at this unsustainable point.

It has been a truly epic failure.