Robert Jenrick hasn’t dropped the mask. That slipped long ago. What he does now is dream up ever crueller options, like Jigsaw in the Saw movies, daring the country to stomach one more sadistic “solution.” His latest: prison camps for asylum seekers. Not housing, not processing, but “rudimentary prisons.” His words.
This isn’t policy, it’s performance. He talks of his oldest daughter leaving boots outside her door to scare off migrants, as though that counts as evidence. He claims he saw men in Dover walk into kitchens and steal food. These are pub stories turned into political doctrine. It’s Enoch Powell repackaged for the Instagram era: the scared daughter, the lurking stranger, the state swooping in to protect hearth and home.
He isn’t alone. The Home Secretary has been floating schemes to dump people in warehouses, as though human beings were crates to be stacked on pallets. Jenrick says cages, she says sheds. Different packaging, same contempt.
What’s really going on is a leadership bid. Farage says converted facilities1, Jenrick says cages. Farage blusters about deportations, Jenrick insists legal migration is worse than illegal. The logic is simple: wherever Reform plant their flag, Jenrick wants to be two steps further to the right.
But here’s the tell. He doesn’t just attack asylum seekers, he sneers at “low-wage, low-skilled individuals and their dependents.” In other words, the workers who built the NHS, who pick the food, who clean the offices and keep this whole country upright. Jenrick’s Britain is open for business only if you’re a coder, a surgeon, or a hedge funder. Everyone else goes in the camp, the warehouse, or on the plane.
It’s class war dressed up as border control. Thatcherism with razor wire. And the danger isn’t that Jenrick will be laughed out of the room. The danger is Labour will meet him halfway, and the so-called centre ground will shift again. Before long, camps and deportations will be presented as common sense, another brick in the wall of “security” and “public trust.”
This is where British politics is heading: a contest to see who can dream up the cruellest scheme, who can lock up the most vulnerable the fastest. Jenrick thinks that’s his ticket to Downing Street. Unless he’s stopped, he might be right.
- Jenrick called them “cabins with a fence around them” ↩︎
