One reaches a certain age, or at least I have, where the spectacle of public life no longer surprises but merely confirms the gentle, inexorable slide into absurdity that the gods, in their infinite sporting malice, have arranged for our entertainment. Yet even by those lowered standards, the latest wheeze from Shabana Mahmood, our Home Secretary, leaves one groping for the appropriate expletive. "I fucking despair" will have to do. It has the virtue of honesty, if little else.
Ms Mahmood, with the air of a woman who has studied the polling data more closely than the shipping forecasts, has announced reforms to the asylum system. These come billed as the most significant changes in modern times, which is rather like describing a fresh coat of paint on the Titanic as a bold navigational initiative. On the one hand, we are to have temporary protection for new refugees—thirty months, renewable, with the cheerful prospect of being packed off home the moment some junior civil servant in the Foreign Office decides that, say, Damascus has become 'safe enough' for a family with three small children and a history of having opposed the regime. On the other, shiny new 'safe and legal routes': community sponsorship schemes, university places, work visas, all modelled on the Homes for Ukraine programme but expanded, like a particularly ambitious virus, to conflicts the world over. Numbers will start small, they assure us. They always do. Then they grow. Like waistlines after Christmas.
The genius of the thing is its exquisite symmetry. With one hand the government tightens the rules just enough to sound stern on the doorstep in marginal seats; with the other it flings open new doors through which hundreds of thousands may eventually pass, each one clutching the sacred biometric ID that says 'genuine' in the soothing bureaucratic dialect. It is the political equivalent of promising to lock the stable door while simultaneously installing a revolving one, complete with welcoming committee and complimentary halal catering.
One admires the sheer brass of it. Here we are, a nation already straining at the seams with record net migration, housing shortages that make Victorian rookeries look like spacious executive apartments, an NHS waiting list longer than the M25 on a bank holiday, and schools where English is effectively a second language in several classrooms. And what is the solution? More of the same, but better marketed. The Ukraine scheme, we are reminded, was a success. Indeed it was, if your metric for success is the importation of large numbers of people who, through no fault of their own, have no intention of returning even when the shooting stops. Now we are to globalise that particular triumph. Every warlord, every failed state, every ethnic dust-up from the Sahel to the South China Sea will have its own bespoke British welcome mat. Splendid.
The satire writes itself, which is fortunate because reality has outpaced the satirists. We are told these new routes will be 'capped' and 'sustainable.' One wonders what the cap is measured against. The capacity of the housing stock? The tolerance of the native population? Or merely the ability of the Home Office to process the paperwork without the servers melting? Past performance suggests the latter. Sustainable, in Whitehall parlance, means "we'll keep doing it until the electorate revolts or the money runs out, whichever comes first."
And the voters—ah, the voters. One cannot help noticing, with the cold eye of the detached observer, that importing large numbers of people who tend to vote in predictable ways for the party that imported them has certain electoral advantages. It is not, of course, that anyone would be so crude as to say this aloud. Instead we get sonorous speeches about our 'international obligations' and 'generosity of spirit.' Generosity is a wonderful thing when exercised with other people's neighbourhoods, other people's schools, and other people's tax receipts. The middle classes, safely ensconced in their Islington terraces or Cotswold boltholes, can virtue-signal to their hearts' content while the consequences land elsewhere. This is not policy; it is moral cosplay with real-world victims.
One might even compare this particular chapter of national self-harm to one of those Japanese game shows where contestants are dared to endure ever more inventive forms of discomfort. Except here the discomfort is not for the participants but for the audience—the great British public, expected to applaud as their country is rearranged around them. We are assured that strict checks will be carried out: biometrics, criminality screening, health assessments. One is reminded of the man who, having lost his keys in a dark alley, searches for them under the streetlamp "because that's where the light is." The real problems—cultural cohesion, integration that actually works, the maintenance of a recognisable society—lie in the shadows, unexamined.
What we are witnessing is not so much reform as ritual. The government must be seen to be doing something. The something in question must simultaneously appease the human rights lobby, the business lobby that likes cheap labour, and the voters who are growing restive. The result is this baroque compromise: temporary status that will prove as temporary as a Scottish Conservative majority, and new routes that will prove as expansive as the human imagination when it comes to claiming persecution.
So yes, I despair. I absolutely fucking despair. Not because compassion is wrong—compassion is essential—but because it has been nationalised, bureaucratised, and turned into a growth industry that devours the very society it claims to improve. We have forgotten that a country is not an hotel with infinite rooms, nor a charity with infinite funds. It is a home. And you do not keep adding extensions to the house until the foundations crack, all the while lecturing the original occupants that they must learn to love the renovation. Ms Mahmood and her colleagues will no doubt press on, convinced of their own moral superiority. History, that merciless satirist, will deliver the punchline.
One only hopes the rest of us are still around to appreciate it when the bill arrives.