What sort of sickeningly malicious disgrace to humanity do you have to be to look at a group of refugees, huddled together in small boats coming across the English Channel, fleeing for their lives in search of a better life, and think “These people have no right to be here”? The issue of asylum seekers was the first thing I saw when I turned on the news this morning, and I must say that I find what the Tories are doing in using this issue to distract everyone from the failures of Brexit, whipping their brainless Daily-Fail reading voters up into a xenophobic frenzy, to be utterly abhorrent. It is sickening: no truly educated person could contemplate turning refugees away in the way in which the Tories are proposing, but they want to appeal to people who see the world in the simplest, crudest of terms – the type of people who voted for and still support Brexit; the type of people who cannot see charlatans like Farage for the scum they are.

The Tories may try to dress what they are proposing up as about safety, and say they are just trying to safeguard people from making dangerous journeys across the channel; but at the end of the day this is nothing but an unspeakably cruel, malicious plot to scapegoat people desperately trying to find safety in order to shore up the core Conservative vote. If they really were concerned for the safety of these people, they would be working to set up safe, legal ways for them to get into the country, not leaving them to the savages of the sea. Rather, this is just about preventing people who the tories and their voters see as ‘different’ from coming here, and Sunak’s insistence that it is neither cruel or unkind to want to turn these desperate people away, or that this is somehow about dealing with people-trafficking gangs, is nothing but a repulsive attempt to salve the consciences of bigots. These policies are thus motivated not by humanity but only by hatred. Thus I find the way this pandering to xenophobic morons has taken centre stage in British political discourse utterly repugnant. Surely such bigotry and cruelty has no place here.