It is another scratchy, difficult week for the government. Inflation is up, to 3.8 per cent in July – the highest level since January 2024. Asylum applications are now at record levels with 111,000 applying during Keir Starmer’s first year in office. But the real body blow is the interim High Court injunction to stop migrants from being accommodated at The Bell Hotel in Epping. Unsurprisingly, dozens of councils of the country are now poised to launch similar action.

That creates a very difficult dilemma for Yvette Cooper. The Home Secretary has sought to downplay and depoliticise the housing of asylum seekers, pointing, not unfairly, to the industrial scale under which this occurred for many years under the Tories. But now, it seems, local authorities have reached their breaking point. I

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