 We have spoken so many times on this show about the pathetic freak out at the top of the Tory party caused by a few thousand migrants in dingy's crossing the English channel today we discovered just how far our government would go to reduce the number of asylum seekers arriving in Britain a number which is already less than a quarter of those arriving in Germany and a third of those who arrive in France so how will Britain resolve its fabricated migrant crisis. I sending asylum seekers to the South Atlantic that's at least an idea that was first floated by pretty Patel who asked officials to explore the possibility of constructing an asylum processing center on Ascension Island which is a British overseas territory over 4,000 miles away from the UK so I have to admit I hadn't heard of Ascension Island and so we're gonna sort of give you a visual representation of where this is how far it is away so let's get up graphic nine a. You'll know where UK is on the Mac but let's point out where the UK is and where Kent is now Ascension Island is so small and so remote that it doesn't appear on a lot of world maps including this one but this is where Ascension Island is that's pretty far away so that's distance it's over 4,000 miles away you can see that Google confirming that and that's by the by how the crow flies I don't know how they're gonna get these people there this proposal was discussed by conservative MP Laura trot and Labour MP Richard Bergen on today's politics. I'm a Kent MP we have increasing number of boats coming across the channel is an incredibly dangerous crossing we need to stop people doing it and we also need to reduce the pressure on Kent to unable to take any more children into care so it's something that I think it's absolutely right that we look at right in terms of offshoring people even as far as we look at solutions to the problem as I said I haven't seen the details of this but just listening to that that's the headline it was considered by the government and is it something that they should be looking at. Like I said we need to make sure that we reduce the incentives to come across as incredibly dangerous crossing it's been problematic people have died we've got to stop that happening. Richard a good or a bad idea? I think it's totally inhumane people talk about values based immigration system this is values based based upon rotten values based upon values that actually seem quite racist and based upon values which actually fill us all with shame if that's going to be the approach the British government will take. We're talking here about vulnerable people fleeing war and persecution and there's these reports that the Home Secretary is thinking of shipping them thousands of miles away to an isolated island. And how would you how would you how would you deter people coming across making that dangerous crossing across the English Channel in Dingies? Well we need to make sure there's safe legal passage for people fleeing war and persecution we should be proud of doing that as a country. That's the kind of country that we should be and I think lots of people will be completely appalled at these reports. Again I mean I know the focus of this should be how horrific this is to people who are seeking safety but for me the thing that really sort of I mean gets me on this one is how pathetic it is. You know as we've said so many times on this show there is not a migrant crisis when it comes to Britain. Yes sometimes movements of hundreds of thousands of people do cause some sort of you know social difficulties in a place cultural differences of a housing example. If you're in Lebanon and there's two million people coming over from Syria I'm sure that will cause some social problems and some people will have concerns about it. We've had 4,000 people coming across the channel in Little Dingies and we're now considering doing something so severe so extreme as to move them to an island 4,000 miles away. Now that is the kind of I would know I would not support that in any circumstances but it's the kind of thing you can imagine a country turning to if say like Greece it's got half a million people who are sort of coming over onto islands. Again I'm not I'm not saying they should send their migrants over to Ascension Island. I'm just saying it would at least be comprehensible for a government to be considering that but in this country we've got 4,000 people coming over that is that is nothing. We're a big country with 60 million people 4,000 people come over in a year and we suddenly think it's acceptable it's reasonable to be sending people 4,000 miles away. I think that there's a historical story here which is one about the ways in which settler colonial techniques were first exported from Britain to the colonies and now they find their way back. And I think this is the case with this Australian style offshore detention system. When people first started talking about an Australian style immigration detention immigration system lots of us on the left were saying well isn't that going to involve offshore detention and people said no you're crazy. You're being completely alarmist you want to smear everyone as a racist and a fascist this is just about the points. But I think that talk of offshore detention regardless of whether or not it is deemed to be feasible affordable and actually happens was always going to feature and loom quite large because when it comes to immigration policy the cruelty is the point. It isn't a byproduct it isn't some kind of glitch or failure to imagine consequences on the part of the government it is the point. It's been the case explicitly in Australia when it comes to offshore detention which is itself supposed to be a deterrent. It's not supposed to be a more efficient way of handling asylum claims. It is supposed to be nasty and it has dreadful consequences in particular in the offshore detention facilities at Manus and now you have a mental health crisis. You have normalized suicidal behavior and suicidal behavior has been found in children as young as eight. So you have children who aren't even old enough for secondary school being pushed to the point of self harm and attempts in their life because of the conditions that they're in. And this isn't some big secret. You have literally an award-winning journalist Beru Bushani who has been blowing the whistle on this for ages and it has made fairly a ripple. He won an award for his writing while in an offshore detention facility but other than that it wasn't something that was taken all that seriously. And it's been deliberately ignored I think by the press in this country. We've been happy to talk about an Australian point style system completely devoid of content and what that will actually mean. This isn't the first time it's been suggested in this country. Offshore detention was something which was suggested by new labour. Of course the immigration detention system that we have here today is a product of new labour policy. However I think that it's no coincidence that this is rearing its head now because pretty patelle amongst many other things is very skilled at knowing who her base is. And when it comes to keeping a finger on that nasty clogged pulsing artery of middle England, she's got it and she knows their tastes. So I think she's been able to quite cannily float these ideas which regardless of whether or not they happen is playing to that thirst for cruelty and punishment for asylum seekers. I mean I think that point about it not being about efficiency it's about being cruelty and punishment is so important. Because I mean obviously the sort of official line here is the reason you send them to a different place is sort of one of space. There isn't space for these people on Britain even though there's only 6% of England is built upon. And it's an even stupider argument when it comes to Australia because Australia's fucking huge and not many people live there. So it's not that you send asylum seekers off to an island because there'll be more space for them there. It's that you can treat them more appallingly without having the sort of same rule of law and the same norms that apply on the island of the British Isles. You can treat them more in a different way. You move them to a different place because then you can treat them less humanly. You can treat them like they're sub human like they're of a different type like aliens. We're going to go now to the labor response which was disappointing to say the least. So Richard Bergen there gave quite a powerful argument you know this is about values. That's the problem here that this is against our values that they would even consider this. Keir Starmer's was somewhat more meek. So let's get up a tweet from Sienna Rogers who is commenting on the official labor press conference or press briefing that happens after PMQs. So she writes Keir's response to the idea of processing asylum seekers on Ascension Island ludicrous and inhumane. It's completely impractical and it would be hugely expensive for taxpayers. Now people said well he said it was inhumane but he didn't expand on it being inhumane. And this idea that it adds extra weight to your argument to say it's impractical and it would be hugely expensive for taxpayers. I mean maybe it is impractical and maybe it would be hugely expensive for taxpayers but that doesn't strengthen your argument. It weakens your argument because again if you want to say no why not why not say you know people who don't like migrants maybe they could be persuaded by an economic argument. You know maybe maybe they don't want migrants to be here but they might think it's too expensive to send them over there. Now if you think that the way to argue for a more humane immigration system in this country is to say it's more efficient to have a humane system. It's cheaper to have a humane system. I'll sell you the remain campaign for the EU referendum right because we've tried that and it doesn't work. And this is also something where I don't think you necessarily need a particularly radical line. I mean this is where I think actually progressive patriotism could come into it because you can say look we as a country are a welcoming nation when people look for support. We don't ship them off to islands and also we're good enough. We're good enough. We're economically productive enough. We've got the wherewithal to expand the capacity of this economy to welcome people in. It was a bit like the sort of Merkel line when Syrians came over and integrated a million people. We can do this. It might not be easy but we can do this whereas this argument that oh we maybe could do it be a bit impractical and it would cost some money. I mean people what we know about the British public is they are willing to lose a bit of economic growth to get rid of more migrants. Unless you take the desire to have less migrants head on you're never going to win. Ash are we you know this is just one answer from a Labour Party spokesperson. It's not necessarily you know going to appear in the manifesto but this is in line with the positions they've been taking since Kierstarman became leader. Yeah you're right it is and what's really disappointing about it is that this is also something that the shadow home secretary parroted which is that it's inhumane yes but more to the point is inefficient and expensive and the problem with that is that it doesn't address the core problem which is that migrants and asylum seekers have for decades been dehumanised so much that they're considered a kind of living breathing virus. They're dirty, they're diseased, their mere presence is contaminating and you've got to handle them as far away as possible you know with latex gloves and detergent and all the rest of it. And that's something which has been a mainstay of British politics for a very long time and it was fed by of course new Labour. David Blunkett as home secretary became obsessed with the asylum issue. That gave a great boost to the BNP who were looking to make gains in those white flight constituencies around London and it far from being able to neuter right-wing talking points on migration it just further embedded them because what you have to do is insist upon the shared humanity of migrants and asylum seekers. These people aren't dirty, they're not criminal, they're not wrong. They're coming here because they've had good things about this country being welcoming and tolerant and being a place where you can make a life for yourself. Don't know where they heard that, probably not through listening to Navarra media but you know that's a good international reputation to have. So I agree with you that this could be integrated into storytelling about this country and who we would like to think of ourselves as. I just don't think that it has deep roots. It's very shallow roots that it's not going to hold on and it's because of the ways in which we've had ideas of sovereignty and incursions upon that sovereignty be racialized and anthropomorphized as the figure of the migrant for so long. I think that's an uphill struggle but it's one worth doing. The alternative is to give in to the far right talking points which are going to win anyway. I mean you also have to, the progressive patriotism, you have to do the work, right? So I sort of, when people were saying, oh Kirstam is sitting with a British flag, that's terrible, it's coddling up to the far right. I was like, no, look, I mean you have to do that. But he hasn't done the work to make that symbol mean anything else than it's meant before. What he's done since hanging out with that flag is say the reason we shouldn't just deport migrants to islands is because it's a bit expensive and of course we can't vote against a bill which makes torture legal five years ago. The Guardian released a story just before we went live which is basically an expansion of this one. So let's go to the headline. Revealed number 10 explores sending asylum seekers to Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea. Document seen by Guardian suggests foreign office officials are pushing back at proposals for processing claims in detention facilities overseas. What's interesting here is that it's the foreign office pushing against this. So they're saying basically this isn't going to work diplomatically. We don't think these islands are going to let us have asylum detention facility. So it's not going to work on those terms. It doesn't seem like anyone's come out and say, no, this would be completely humane. They just say, diplomatically, this doesn't work. Before I go to you, Ash, I want to look at something really depressing, which is the polling on this. So you gov did a poll today asking people whether they think this is a good idea or a bad idea. So they said to people, Brits on the idea of building an asylum processing center on Ascension Island, a remote UK territory 5,000 miles from the UK as considered by the government. Good idea. 40% of people think it's a good idea. 35% of people think it's a bad idea. Obviously, you can see there that this is very much split along voting lines. So Labour voters think it's a bad idea to send asylum seekers 5,000 miles away to an island. Conservative voters seem to think it's a very good idea. So Ash, I mean, a lot of work to be done here. There is a lot of work to be done. I mean, there's a seemingly limitless appetite for cruelty within the British political imagination. And without the Labour Party taking a much more muscular approach to it and integrating a humanising approach to asylum and immigration with an economic policy platform which can promise to be the tide which raises all boats. I don't know how you're supposed to go about fixing this as a problem. I mean, one thing that I would say is that this idea doesn't actually have to happen in order for it to have political traction and for it to be an effective lightning rod if you like for the forces of right-wing reaction. Donald Trump didn't build that wall. You know, piecemeal bits of fencing is not the same as the towering structure which can be seen from Mars or whatever that was promised. But it was still imaginatively able to capture a certain feeling a feeling of wanting to put the borders up, shunt the refugees and the immigrants away and insist on a kind of national purity. And that idea having so much traction isn't itself dangerous even if these facilities don't get built. Thank you.