Housing asylum seekers in tents won't solve problem

Kemi Badenoch might say that she was “only asking a question” when she said, at a meeting with protesters against an asylum hotel in Epping: “Is it possible for us to set up camps and police that, rather than bringing all of this hassle into communities?” But it wouldn’t be a good idea.

- John Rentoul, The Independent

While the answer is yes—it is technically possible to build tent villages away from population centres to house those applying for refugee status — these camps would always be close to somewhere. Badenoch's question is an example of the politics of “far away” that has always afflicted thinking about asylum-seekers. Even Tony Blair considered a detention camp on the island of Mull, which seems empty and far ‘away from London — but people live there, too, and in the end he decided that he was also only asking a question.

He also thought about using the Falklands for an asylum processing centre, and the last Conservative government went through Ascension Island and St Helena before finally devising a scheme that was the ultimate “far away”, to deport arrivals to Rwanda without even considering their applications for asylum. And Rwanda only ever had the capacity to take a few hundred migrants, which would have been insignificant against the 50,000 that have arrived by small boat in little more than a year of the Labour government.