No, Kemi – tent villages won't solve this 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.

- By JOHN RENTOUL

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.