Let’s get beyond labels like refugees and asylum seekers. We are talking about desperate people. They are fleeing their homes and families often escaping torture and persecution. We’ve done this for a long time – look at the people we took in before and during WW2 fleeing the Nazi’s.

Human rights and dignity are something we should always protect – people are people. They don’t want to be in hotels. They want the chance to work and be part of the community.

The goal should be to end the use of hotels as quickly as possible. We urge the government to intensify their efforts to process the asylum backlog. The backlog was deliberately allowed to get out of hand by the last government thinking that a failure to process applications quickly would deter people coming – it did not!

Trump and Farage are using the same playbook whipping up concerns over immigration to their own nationalistic ends – I’m a firm believer that the problem is not arriving by dinghy or small boat – it’s flying above our head by private jet.