Well-founded concerns about the suitability of post-war international agreements to modern global conditions are not strengthened by being lumped together with attacks on multiculturalism.
Armed officers and soldiers obviously cannot have carte blanche to shoot as they please; but there must be some allowance for the impossibility of always getting every split-second judgement right.
Instead of a Conservative housing policy that emphasises home ownership and architectural beauty, it will now be done the Labour way. When tower blocks start rising over the Home Counties, I hope that our remaining MPs realise their mistake.
Our deputy editor tells Newsnight that the controversy about housing illegal entrants in hotels will continue until the Government bites the bullet and builds a proper asylum estate.
Labour are happy to hammer the Government for it’s lack of progress, but lack any convincing alternative plan to make the system effective and bring numbers down.
It is my job to champion the police, and I am both energised and reassured when I speak to coppers, so many of whom do truly heroic work. But is also my job to hold them to account. And trust has been lost.
The more totemic this legislation appears, the higher will be public expectations of it. Even if it passes, will Rishi Sunak be able to persuade voters it was worth the wait?
Without much more significant progress, the cost of the asylum system to hard-pressed taxpayers is only going to keep rising.
The question is whether the Government can negotiate enough bilateral deals to solve the problem, or has to rely on the Rwanda scheme.
Robert Jenrick says that high net immigration puts pressure on services and discourages investment in innovation and British workers.
However, he stresses that it’s “relatively early days” when pressed on what has happened to all the others.
Ministers would need to honestly confront why we are so reliant on immigrant labour and then start implementing policies to cut that dependency – not at some point in the future, but now.
If you bluntly tell your officials to do their jobs, you are accused of bullying; if, like Braverman, you are by nature polite, you find yourself undermined in other ways.
And this is the fundamental problem: it allows us to dodge a broader long-term industrial strategy, precisely because the short-term labour fix is so easy.
If Suella Braverman wants to restore “common-sense policing”, she should start by overhauling the Public Order Act.