The Home Secretary has found her enemy and, predictably, it’s not the criminal landlords, the hotels leeching public money, or the decades of manufactured scarcity in housing; it’s the refugee mother and child. “Temporarily suspending” family reunion while promising “longer periods” and new “contribution requirements” is not technocratic tidying. This is the moral core of a new deterrence regime whose purpose is to show Reform UK and the Mail that Labour can be as cruel, only more competently so. All the buzzwords are there—“sustainable,” “orderly,” “control”—yet the reality is the same: squeeze the most vulnerable, cite European comparators, and call the cruelty both necessary and fair.
This is how triangulation works in an age of tabloid securitarianism. Starmer signals he “completely gets it” about hotels; Cooper translates the feeling into policy by suspending the single route that actually reduces dangerous crossings: safe, predictable reunion with loved ones. Then, like clockwork, the far right declares it a “tiny tweak,” which is the point—if you take your rhythm from the drum, the drummer always wants more. The choreography is tedious but effective: panic about “pull factors,” ignore the push factors (war, repression, climate), and recode a right as a privilege to be earned by “contribution” and English tests. It’s a paywall around your own family.
“Take your rhythm from the drum and the drummer always wants more.”
The bad faith is industrial scale. Labour invokes councils’ homelessness pressures as if those pressures were divine weather rather than the outcome of 14 years of austerity compounded by Starmer-era fiscal hair-shirt. Hotels are “unsustainable,” yes, because successive governments gutted social housing, outsourced asylum accommodation to profiteers, and now use the predictable crisis to ratchet border discipline. The spectacle at Epping shows the feedback loop: a court corrects a shoddy injunction; the right screams “bias”; government briefings pivot to “public order” and “fear of crime”; policy tightens; gangs grow a new market; the tabloids blame the courts again. Rinse, monetise, repeat.
Family reunion is not an add-on to be fiddled with while the base chugs lager and waves a flag. It’s the thin thread that keeps people alive long enough to begin again. The Home Office’s own numbers tell the story: the route overwhelmingly serves women and children. In the moral algebra of deterrence, that fact does not count; in the real world, it is the whole equation. You cannot claim to be “ending hotel use” while closing the door that allows families to move into ordinary life (work, school, a GP) rather than being warehoused and then scapegoated for the warehousing.
“The Home Office’s own numbers tell the story: the route overwhelmingly serves women and children.”
The Labour leadership imagines it is doing grown-up politics: taking those “tough” decisions, neutralising the attack line, tidying the system. But this is not grown-up; it is submissive. It cedes the terrain to Farage’s common sense and then complains about Farage. It accepts the Mail’s frame (the one that starts with migrants as a problem to be managed) then complains about the Mail. And in the interstices between “pilot returns,” “independent panels,” and the endless bump-fencing of the ECHR, actual human lives are stretched and snapped. The state congratulates itself for “balancing rights”; the child asks why her father has vanished into policy.
There is a deeper class politics at work. “Contribution requirements” sound neutral until you remember who can “contribute” on demand: those already endowed with housing, savings, networks. The very advantages refugees are structurally denied. The same dominant class that commodified housing now moralises about “dependency,” then erects a means test for love. If you want a definition of neoliberal virtue, this is it: your value is your solvency, even to your own family.
“The same class that commodified housing now erects a means test for love.”
The government says it won’t leave the ECHR; it prefers to hollow out its application. We will hear more about “clarifying” Article 8, the need to curb “exceptional circumstances,” and the importance of “public interest tests.” Translation: restrict the legal pathways so that appeals fail faster, and call it “efficiency.” Meanwhile, ministers all chime that we will have an “orderly” closures of hotels by 2029. Which, of course, will be another deadline to be slipped when the next panic demands it. All the while this Labour government continues to signal to the mob that the state shares its disgust.
There is an alternative, but it requires the courage this Cabinet lacks: expand safe routes; fund councils and build social housing at scale; de-financialise asylum accommodation; prosecute the firms profiteering from human bottlenecks; and stop treating courts as public-order nuisances to be managed. Most of all, refuse the nationalist morality play in which every policy must demonstrate a willingness to make someone suffer. If you want to reduce the boats, open the doors that mean people don’t need them.
