Forget the f-bombs, the Tories can’t even win the argument on immigration with themselves

It’s well known that once you start swearing you lose the argument, writes Tom Peck. But the point is not to win the argument, the point is to be cruel

We have recently learned that the prime minister ‘supports’ Lee Anderson’s comments (PA/AP)

“If they don’t like barges then they should f*** off back to France.”

If you hang around near right-wing politics, you’ll hear this sort of thing all too often. I’ve been at the “immigration panel” at the Ukip conference when men in the crowd have stood up and shouted “Send them back! Send them back!”

I once went door knocking with Jacob Rees-Mogg when a man in the street bounded up to him with a copy of The Sun tucked under his arm. On its front page was the latest misery from the Mediterranean migrant crisis of 2015 and the man told him, “I probably shouldn’t say this but I’m glad they’re drowning. Better that than them coming here.”

Rees-Mogg immediately told him it was a dreadful thing to say. But it’s no longer the dreadful people who loiter around right-wing politics who say the dreadful things, but the politicians themselves.

Lee Anderson is the deputy chair of the Conservative Party. His comments weren’t unguarded. They weren’t secretly filmed, or said in some place where the environment had got the better of him. He said them directly to a journalist at the Daily Express, on the record, for publication.

The context, of course, is the ongoing row around the government’s rolling act of performative cruelty. Hiring a barge with room for 222 people and trying to cram it with 500 asylum seekers, then revelling in the ongoing legal complaints, which has thus far allowed them to make enemies, yet again, out of “lefty lawyers” and even the fire brigade, who have had the temerity to point out that the barge is unsafe.

We have since learned that the prime minister “supports” Anderson’s comments. Though it is not immediately clear how much attention he was paying to the question at hand while offering his support, given that he was otherwise occupied in a luxury California Disneyland restaurant where a meal can cost £12,000.

It’s also not clear whether Anderson knows how stupid even his underlying point is, without the added viciousness of his pub bore language. It’s not merely that there is no clear process by which any of said asylum seekers can “f*** off back to France” even if they wanted to. First, not all of them by any means have even come from France. The Bibby Stockholm is a pantomime solution to the small boats problem, but the country’s enormous asylum backlog actually has very little to do with the method by which said asylum seekers have arrived.

Anderson, of course, has form for this. He first made himself slightly famous by claiming he would deal with antisocial behaviour by making people live in tents and pick potatoes and be hosed down with cold water every morning.

It’s already been said, countless times, that once you start swearing you lose the argument. But the point is not to win the argument. The point is to be cruel. And they can’t even win the argument with themselves. On Sky News yesterday morning, the immigration minister Robert Jenrick was asked why it takes two to three years to process an asylum claim in this country, whereas in Germany it’s done in six months. His answer involved him claiming that a) if you process them quickly, as Labour wants to do, you just encourage more people and b) he had personally massively increased the speed at which claims are processed.

He was, in his own words, solving the problem by making it worse.

This is the central problem of the government’s deliberate focus on small boats, and trying to make it the only battle they can win, by meting out pointless cruelty so they can call the Labour Party soft. The longer the public are forced to look at the problem, the clearer the truth becomes. That it is a mess entirely of the government’s making and it has no idea how to solve it. Jenrick is not a stupid man by any stretch of the imagination, but he can’t stop himself accidentally agreeing that everything is his own fault, because it’s the ultimately unavoidable truth.

The voters have already worked it out, and without the need for vulgarity. It will end not with asylum seekers, but with the honourable member for Ashfield f*****g off back to wherever it is he came from.