By Abigail Pennson, our reasonable, plain-speaking middle-class columnist who wishes Boris had acted with Putin’s clear-eyed resolve
ASYLUM backlogs at a record high? Isn’t that bad news for Stopping the Boats, the only Rishi Sunak pledge anyone cares about? Or is he far cleverer than anyone thought?
Because Britain’s asylum backlog, the greatest of any civilised nation, a towering backlog that can be seen around the curvature of the earth, is all to our advantage.
We need to terrify refugees. And given these are people to whom the gun and the bomb are a way of life and a method of classroom discipline, that’s no easy task.
But that bureaucratic backlog Rishi’s oh-so-subtlely allowed to build? That mountain of paperwork that Home Office officials, whipped into snarling, sadistic shape by Braverman, aren’t even pretending to reduce?
That scares them, alright. Because in their benighted countries, so backward they rejected the benevolence of the British Empire, no piece of paperwork is complete without a thousand dollars slipped between the leaves.
Refugees aren’t afraid of Bibby Stockholm. That’s paradise to them. They don’t fear being deported to Rwanda because there’s no functional difference between it and Syria or whatever. What threat is there in going from foreign to foreign?
Paperwork? That scares them more than a million Talibans, who they basically agree with anyway. The idea of waiting in line? Of correctly filling in a form? Of, God help me, being polite to authority? That sends them running back to the land of rudeness: Europe.
Let that backlog mount, Rishi. Let word of it spread through the warzones of the world. Let child soldiers pick up their guns and make something of their own bloody country rather than join the holding pattern in the Channel, waiting for their ticket to be called.
Fight the invaders with what Britain does best: paperwork, red tape, and 120-minute waits for calls to be answered while listening to crackly versions of Greensleeves. They’d rather die.
