Suella Braverman: it would have been good to run a picture of her at the Manston Concentration Camp – but she has never even been there.

Suella Braverman – already under fire for breaching confidentiality rules and lying about reporting it promptly – can’t even do her job properly, it seems.

She is responsible for conditions at the Manston Migrant Processing Centre in Kent – a concentration camp for people who have used illegal means to cross the English Channel in order to seek asylum in the United Kingdom.

It seems 4,000 people are living at the camp, which was only intended to house a maximum of 1,600 – and those only for a short time. People are supposed to be there for a maximum of 48 hours but some have already stayed for more than five weeks.

It is a hotbed for disease, with at least eight cases of diphtheria and one of MRSA.

Hundreds of people were moved there from another facility in Dover after that camp was firebombed – allegedly by a man who threw three petrol bombs with fireworks attached then drove to a nearby petrol station and took his own life.

Home Office advice to ministers has been – for some time – that they should book hotel rooms and put asylum seekers there while they are being processed. According to Robert Peston, this has been largely ignored:

And now the pressure is on Braverman. Poetic justice, some might say.

So Shapps did the right thing. But look at the reaction from just one far-right Twitter user:

Obviously it is not illegal to seek asylum in the UK, even if entry was obtained be illegal means.

And immigration is different from asylum-seeking.

But they both have the same root cause, which is that conditions in these people’s home countries are deemed to be so unsafe that they have to try to go somewhere else.

So the answer to the migrant boat problem is not to try to sour the milk by making the UK an unattractive destination; it is to seek better conditions in the new arrivals’ home countries.

This creates all sorts of problems for UK Tory governments because they are often part of the reasons other countries are dangerous for their own populations.

Like many western nations, we manipulate political circumstances all around the world in order to gain economic power. That’s why we have participated in so many wars in the Middle East and Africa; our businesses have financial interests there that disadvantage local people – and enforce their continuation with violence or the threat of it. If that leads to conflict, it seems a price our government is willing to pay.

We destabilise whole regions of the world in order to make a few quid and think nothing of the harm it does to the people living there.

And when they arrive at our door seeking asylum from the conditions our government has caused, we are encouraged to see them as the villains.

It’s not good enough. The UK government is the villain in this situation – more so for encouraging us to try to harm these refugees as the Dover petrol bomber did.

It is only by improving conditions in the countries these people are fleeing that we can reduce the numbers of people coming to the UK – numbers that are still far lower than are arriving in other European countries like Germany.

Then it will be possible to deal with the separate problem of illegal immigration – which I’m sure does exist but is being used as an excuse to attack people who are already victims.

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

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