 Two plans for detaining migrants outside of Britain were leaked to newspapers this week. So the first, as we discussed on Wednesday's show, was the idea to set up detention centres on the Ascension Islands in the South Atlantic. The second, which the Times splashed on Thursday, was to detain asylum seekers in disused ships. So you can see they're floating asylum centres planned on retired ferries. We've spoken about why these are such terrible policies. We talked about it at length on Wednesday, but just to summarise, I mean, it's completely inhumane because the only reason the government wants to put migrants offshore, put them either on ships or on islands is not because there's not enough space in the country, there's obviously enough space in the country. There's only 9,000 people who cross this, or 7,000, 9,000, something. It's in those, it's around that figure who arrived in Britain this year. This country, only 2% of it is built on for residential properties. I mean, we have enough space. The reason they want these people offshore is not because we're short of space in this country, it's because they want to be under less scrutiny when they abuse their human rights, essentially. If people are in Britain, it's much easier for them to get the proper legal representation which they deserve than if you put them on a boat or if you put them on an island. It's also much harder for them to complain about their conditions and get justice, get accountability if they are suffering human rights abuses on an island far away or on a ferry. As you said, it's also completely unnecessary for obvious reasons, but also it makes Britain just look completely pathetic. We take one quarter of the amount of asylum seekers as Germany do and one third the amount France does. There is no excuse for this. It's outrageous. What I want to focus on today, though, is where these ideas came from. What explains why we're hearing about them right now? This has been a subject of discussion in the newspapers this week, although we're going to give you some broader background in a moment. Let's go to the ones from this week. A source in the Guardian says, responsibility lies at the door of Dominic Cummings. The source who the Guardian describes as close to the home office told the paper that Cummings had become obsessed with the channel crossings. The source is quoted as saying, he's annoyed that it's always in the press and he thinks it goes down really badly with the Red Wall voters, which it does. He wants to deal with it. He thinks these quite extreme ways would be totally fine with Red Wall voters, which it probably is. Now, I mean, this is incredibly worrying for a number of reasons. First of all, he's annoyed because it's in the newspaper and it's annoying certain voters. You can see here the conveyor belt from something being in Nigel Farage's mind becoming government policy. Basically, Nigel Farage, as we spoke about so many times on this show, he led the charge of creating this moral panic about a few thousand people arriving in dinghies with his Twitter videos and that gets picked up by Talk Radio and some of the tabloid newspapers. Suddenly, Dominic Cummings is like, oh, well, it's getting picked up by Nigel Farage and the tabloid newspapers. It's going to have to become government policy. So you've got this really straight conveyor belt from this right wing extremist who's been rejected by the British electorate, by the way, all the way up to the highest echelons of government. And also it seems that his only measure for whether or not this is a good idea is whether it appeals to certain voters, not the human rights of migrants or whether this is in any way a humane or legal system for dealing with people who are seeking refuge. We can go to one more source, actually. So this is a different source who also spoke to the Guardian about Dominic Cummings. So he says of the policy, this is still at the Dom's brain fart stage. No one in government has as yet identified a place for an offshore center. There have been no talks with other governments, but everyone has to kick the tires because it came from him. And this is, I suppose, just showing you how important the judgment of this one man is. So they're saying, lots of departments, the foreign office especially, is saying, pushing back against these plans, especially the foreign office thinks the idea of putting it on an island is not really going to work in the international interests of Britain. They're pushing back against it because Dominic Cummings is obsessed with the idea. They have to look into it fully. The Times sort of had a slightly different focus. So they're looking at how different departments are at war over the asylum plans. And they, again, have a source pinning all the blame on Dominic Cummings. So we can read from one source here. Pretty is being used as a punchbag. She's being caught in the crossfire. A lot of this stuff is coming from number 10, but people are too scared to say it. People are so afraid of crossing DOM that they are pinning it on other departments. So the impression being given is whilst this was blamed on Pretty Patel, it was actually a Dominic Cummings maneuver, a Dominic Cummings operation. But actually, this is important. So they also describe some pretty grim plans being cooked up by the Home Office. So this, you're not meant to believe from here. All the problem is Dom Cummings. All the other departments are fine and care about migrants, human rights. No, let's take a look at this. Proposals drawn up by the Home Office, however, include using water cannon to create waves to push back boats in the channel and using chains to tangle their propellers. The water cannon plan was rejected amid concern that staff could have faced merger charges if migrants drowned. A cabinet office source told the Politico website that the plan were being drawn up by brain dead morons in Miss Patel's department. Now, again, these are just these are, you know, these are plans which are being drawn up options. But you've got to look at this and you've got to look at also what the problems were, right? So they were suggesting using water cannons to create waves to push back desperate migrants in flimsy boats. And their concern was not that they might kill people. Their concern was that Home Office staff might be charged with murder. There's a big difference there. You can be concerned that you're going to murder people or you can be concerned that you're going to get charged with murder. The implication there is if they were confident they weren't going to get caught, they might have done it. You know, if they were confident that a law could be passed, which meant that if you push a migrant off a boat with a water cannon, and then suddenly it's legal and you're immune from being charged with murder, a bit like the soldiers, if they commit a crime five years ago, being immune because enough time has passed, then they'd be happy with it. That's not a moral problem. They have isolated. Is this just Westminster SW1 Tittle Tattle? Or should we care that it is Dominic Cummings who seems obsessed with this idea of prison ships, of migrants being housed in the channel or on offshore islands, and in what will inevitably an incredibly inhumane way? I certainly don't think that this should be taken any less seriously because it's come from Dominic Cummings. I think that, you know, originally, I might say that because Preeti Patel actually holds institutional power in the sense that she is an MP, she's the home secretary, that her word would mean more. But as we all know what Dominic wants, Dominic gets. He seems to be to hold more sway when it comes to decisions that come out of number 10 than your regular cabinet member. But I also think that the reason that we should take this completely very, very seriously is because this is not, obviously, it is a specific turning point in that it is excessively violent, especially these ideas of tangling up propellers and all of this absolutely barbaric nonsense. But this is in many ways a continuity of not just rhetoric on migration and the kind of dehumanizing ways in which people who are desperately moving from dangerous situations or are trying to get to countries where they feel able to speak the language, they feel able to set up some kind of life. It's not just because it's a continuation of that dehumanizing way that we speak about migrants and people who are migrating. It's very much a continuation of policy. We have to remember that we have onshore detention centers that, yes, they aren't as, well, I mean, they are absolutely horrific. They often operate as essentially legal black holes where people don't have access to things like legal counsel. They often don't know exactly why they're being detained and how long they're going to be there for. We've seen consistent reports of sexual violence, of other kinds of physical and psychological violence in these detention centers. Essentially, the purpose of taking them offshore in this way is to just exacerbate what already exists. It's not actually a completely novel policy. And also, as you said, we see this tendency of things that are said by people who are seen as fringe or seen as far right, whether it's Nigel Farage, whether it's Casey Hopkins. When I heard this thing about using water cannons in the channel, it made me think of Katie Hopkins' call to send out military boats into the channel to send back people who are crossing the channel. So I think that the fact that this has such a continuation of already existing policy and the already existing desires and ideological frameworks that we've seen not just out of this government, but out of the British state for a very long time, which is to completely strip people who move from their legal rights, means that this is not actually a completely unprecedented next step. And as you mentioned, the purpose of putting things offshore in this way is to basically increase how much of a legal black hole these sites are. I wish it wasn't the case, but the hiring of Tony Abbott really did show the direction that this government is planning on going on. I'm sure a lot of people are aware that under Tony Abbott's premiership and also under, even outside of his premiership, Australia has used this practice of offshore detention centers. And as a result, we've seen extreme levels of abuse, sexual abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse against children in particular, but also against adults and living conditions that are endured by asylum seekers that are simply unconscionable. And so we're seeing the government really trying to push in that direction. And what I would also say is that this tactic is classic of the Tory government, that tactic of leaking a policy suggestion to see how it plays out, to see how far you can push people, and then either going ahead, depending on the response, or sort of reining it back in, depending if the response to that is particularly hostile, which is why I think it's very important for us to use all of our muscle, to use all of our power, to really push back on this, even at its whispering stage. Because if we let them get off the hook with just sort of mentioning it and let it just become sort of Westminster title title, then that will signal to them that it's something that they can push further and further and further. So I certainly think that because it's a continuation of existing policy, of existing frameworks, and because we know the level of power that Dominic Cummings holds when it comes to policymaking, and because we know that this strategy of putting out little whispers like that to see how things play out in the press and how things play out in terms of public opinion, we know that that to be a strategy of the government when it comes to policymaking, that we should take these very, very seriously. I promised you at the start of this segment that we'd look at sort of the deeper roots of this policy, so we sort of explained where it's coming from in Westminster, but there are actually deeper forces, potentially more powerful forces who are sort of driving this policy for prison ships, and this is demonstrated in testimony that Ken Clark and Charlie Faulkner, so two former justice ministers, gave to the Competition and Markets Authority in 2017. So they were giving evidence because it was at that point in time when Rupert Murdoch wanted to take over the sky be a controlling stake in sky. He hasn't succeeded in that, but obviously, as we know, he's now trying to make various other TV channels in the Fox News Muld. This evidence was written up by Jim Waterston in an article from 2017, and the contents are really quite shocking, actually, and incredibly relevant to the front pages we have been seeing this week. So as I say, it's Ken Clark and Charlie Faulkner giving evidence to the Competition and Markets Authority, and they are especially focused on the obsession of Rebecca Brooks, who at that point in time, the period about which they are talking and was editor of News of the World, she's now chief executive of News UK, so she actually has a more important job, even if it's slightly less public facing. Let's take a look at a quote from Ken Clark, so he was a Tory justice minister in 2010, and he told the commission, within a few weeks of taking over, my prime minister arranged a meeting with Rebecca Brooks. Rebecca Brooks described herself as running the government, now in partnership with David Cameron. I found myself having an extraordinary meeting with Rebecca who was instructing me on criminal justice policy from now on, as I think she had instructed my predecessor, so far as I could see, judging from the numbers of people we had in prison and the growth of rather exotic sentences. It goes on, she wanted me to buy prison ships because she did accept that the capacity of the prisons was getting rather strained, putting it mildly. It was not the way I described it. She really was solemnly telling me that we had got to have prison ships because she had got some more campaigns coming, which is one of her specialities. I regarded this as a very amusing conversation and took not the slightest notice. So Ken Clark says he took not the slightest notice, but it was the meeting organized with the prime minister, David Cameron, with Ken Clark, and Rebecca Brooks is in that room telling him, because I'm doing prison ship campaigns, you have to introduce prison ships. Now, Ken Clark, I don't think did introduce prison ships, so it sounds like he is being honest there. He's saying I pushed back against that and I ignored her. It seems that someone in government now is more amenable to the demands, the sort of requests of Rebecca Brooks to sort of have her campaigns about prison ships be reflected in government policy. I mean, also, the fact that she could just describe herself as running the government now in partnership with David Cameron is pretty goddamn scary. This argument from Ken Clark was both backed up and demonstrates that the influence of the Murdoch press goes across party lines. So Charlie Faulkner, who is a former justice minister, although had a slightly different job, was Lord Chancellor at the time about which he's giving testimony to the competition and markets authority said, when I became the Lord Chancellor responsible for prisons, I was rung up, first of all, by the prime minister, then by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then by the Home Secretary, separately, all asking me why in the face of the prisons crisis I was not considering prison ships. I mean, this is more worrying than what Ken Clark said, because what Ken Clark said is that Rebecca Brooks turned up and said, I'm in control of the government and I want you to do this. What Charlie Faulkner is saying is that the prime minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and then the Home Secretary called him up. These are all, these are labor, labor people. I think in 2007, it could have been Gordon Brown or Tony Blair as prime minister because the handover was in that year. So we've got either Gordon Brown or Tony Blair ringing up the Lord Chancellor to say, we need to introduce prison ships because they've been, seemingly it seems like, because they've been told it by Rebecca Brooks. So this influence, this sort of really pernicious influence of the Murdoch press to try and, you know, really pressure governments, British governments, into adopting more and more inhumane policies is just so palpably on show here. And it also, you know, people say, oh, Dominic Cummings, such an independent mind. He's actually just ramming through the same policies which Rupert Murdoch and his underlings have been asking for for decades. In terms of whether these are new, so did it feed into policies? So there was a prison ship in use between 1997 and 2006. That was under the labor government. It was closed after the chief prison inspector complained that prisoners had no access to exercise or fresh air. So that was a prison ship. And Britain has also interned migrants on ships, which is what is being proposed right now. And I wanna show you finally this newspaper cutting which was unearthed by Solomon Hughes. So you can see MPs visit Tamils held on prison ships. And it says, free labor MPs visited Tamil detainees aboard the prison ship Earl William at Harwich in Essex yesterday, where some have been on hunger strike for six days. The Tamils whose request for asylum has been refused and whose cases under judicial review began the fast in protest against their detention. I'm not gonna read you the whole of it, but you can see there they have, the government have interned Tamils who are fleeing persecution on this ship. They're protesting against their treatment on there, which as you can see from the former chief prison inspector is quite difficult to get time outside and exercise on a prison ships. These are pretty inhumane conditions. You can see who are the MPs who were standing with these people, very unpopular cause back in the day, Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and Harry Cohen. Harry Cohen probably less well known to our viewers than those other two. But you can see these are the politicians who were standing on the frontline with migrants before. I mean, it's still not popular, but back in the day before they had frontline careers they weren't seeking, let's say the limelight. They were talking about cause which they cared about. Dahlia, I want to go to you about this influence, particularly of the son of the murder press of Rebecca Brooks and also how explicit this is. When I saw this article shared this week, I was like, whoa, what? Cause you do see this headline. So this seems a bit random, like put the migrants on shit, like I see where it's coming from, but it seems a bit like it kind of came out of nowhere, but you've had decades of Rebecca Brooks and the son being obsessed with this idea. And now you have a government who is going through slightly difficult times. It's a bit unpopular because of coronavirus and suddenly prison ships will do prison ships. And this is something that Maya Goodfellow's book on the hostile environment does really well, which is it kind of shows that whilst, the hostile environment is something that is very much tied to, it's a program of legislation that is very much tied to Theresa May. And obviously Theresa May did have a massive role in scaling the hostile environment, but really the groundwork for that has been laid over several decades. And it's something that has, and that is includes by labor governments. And I think the important thing here is that this is not just the character of this conservative government. It's not just even the character of the Murdoch's. It's the character of the British States. When we had our last labor government, that labor government was able to operate and was given a pass by the Murdoch press because it was able to participate in that character of the British state when it comes to incarceration, when it comes to migration. And this is why I think that question of abolition or that question of dealing with carceral politics and dealing with these grappling with these very difficult questions around mass incarceration and around, especially how that overlaps with the question of migration, but also how we grapple with questions around things like innocence and punishment and the role of the state in doing that is really, really important questions for progressive people because especially as climate breakdown accelerates the impact of climate breakdown accelerates which will lead to more forced displacement. It will lead to more crises. I think that this strategy of simply locking people up in the most inhumane and degrading conditions, these ideas will see that their light, they will see their time of day when the conditions are right if we don't fight them at this stage. So those questions around carceral politics and imprisonment and detention are urgent, urgent questions for those people who are concerned with things like basic human rights.