Sir Keir Starmer’s recent approach to addressing the asylum crisis seems to be tinged with urgency and desperation.

His plan involves relocating migrants from the hotels that have sparked protests nationwide to an Army barracks in the heart of Inverness and a military training facility in East Sussex.

Rather than providing a lasting resolution, this strategy merely shifts the problem to new areas, which will eventually become hotspots for local residents and activists voicing their concerns.

This quick-fix solution is likely to escalate tensions and fuel divisions in communities already experiencing strain.

In Inverness, Cameron Barracks has been identified to host up to 300 male asylum seekers, with more than £1 million allocated for its refurbishment and upgrades.

That sprucing-up operation will stick in the craws of soldiers and their families languishing in substandard accommodation – but it has also caused a backlash in the Highland city.

The barracks are within walking distance of two schools, prompting a letter to parents from the local authority telling them the ‘safety and wellbeing of pupils’ will be a priority.

If it truly was a priority this bonkers scheme wouldn’t have been proposed in the first place, and it’s not as if there has been any consultation.

Instead, hundreds of men could arrive at the barracks as early as next month – a bombshell for a city with a population of around 80,000, including the surrounding area.

Last week, officials also announced that 600 asylum seekers would temporarily be housed at a training camp on the outskirts of Crowborough, East Sussex.

Cameron Barracks, in the centre of Inverness, where immigrants are due to be housed

Officials also announced that 600 asylum seekers would temporarily be housed at a training camp, pictured, on the outskirts of Crowborough, East Sussex

The Home Office says it’s ‘furious at the level of illegal migrants and asylum hotels’ – though it’s directly responsible on both fronts, so they’re furious at themselves.

Last month MPs on the Home Affairs Committee found the Home Office had ‘squandered’ billions of taxpayers’ pounds on asylum accommodation.

Just under 103,000 asylum seekers are being housed by the Government – with just over 32,000, around a third, accommodated in 210 hotels.

The usual round of buck-passing and blame-shifting has gone into overdrive in a vain bid to explain these monumental failures.

Yet the core problem – illegal immigration across the Channel – is getting steadily worse while the Home Office tinkers around the edges.

In 2025, the 10,000 mark of illegal migrants crossing the Channel was reached before the end of April – more than a month earlier than the year before.

North of the Border, the SNP has virtue-signalled about immigration for many years, to the extent that politically it’s almost impossible to question asylum policy, at least with any degree of credibility.

Back in September, The Scottish Mail on Sunday revealed SNP ministers had quietly shelved their call for Scotland to have full powers over immigration.

John Swinney says his government ‘stands ready’ to facilitate the Cameron Barracks plan – perhaps the only cross-Border battle the SNP has actively avoided in recent times.

Mind you, his own party isn’t always renowned for its inclusiveness and swathes of its grassroots are riddled with xenophobia.

The SNP’s stance on the issue historically has been flexible depending on the audience, but Mr Swinney has positioned the Nationalists as a bulwark against Reform UK, denouncing its calls for mass deportations earlier this year as ‘utterly chilling’.

John Swinney says his government ‘stands ready’ to facilitate the Cameron Barracks plan

Hadush Kebatu being arrested. He was sentenced in September for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in July in Epping, Essex

The Nationalists are in charge of Glasgow, the UK’s asylum capital, currently in the grip of a refugee housing crisis.

Many of the refugees are in hotels, at great cost to the council, after declaring themselves homeless when they are granted leave to remain.

One council source told me: ‘There’s a kind of assumption that people in Glasgow have been pretty relaxed about asylum seekers and refugees, as we have a long history of being part of the Home Office dispersal scheme.

‘But that will be tested to the limit if you say to them that we’re staring down the barrel of budget cuts amounting to more than £60million – or huge council tax increases.’

Labour and the SNP are looking on at this unfolding catastrophe from the sidelines, with little to contribute – beyond the daft plan to decant the problem to military sites.

Sir Keir may now privately regret ditching the previous Tory government’s Rwanda plan – under which people identified by the UK as illegal immigrants or asylum seekers would have been relocated for processing, asylum and resettlement.

The Prime Minister dismissed it as a waste of money after £700million was sunk into the abortive scheme.

But it was only a waste because he binned it before it had got off the ground, arguing instead he would ‘smash the gangs’.

That hasn’t come to pass, unsurprisingly, but Rwanda remains off the table because it was a Labour manifesto commitment to ditch it.

Yet we know that at the Budget later this month, other supposedly unbreakable promises – including a promise not to increase income tax – may be cast aside.

Sir Keir may now privately regret ditching the previous Tory government’s Rwanda plan

Gaslighting has been turned up several notches, so that if you complain about any of this you’re smeared as a racist.

At the centre of the shambles is the Home Office – which is in a state of utter dysfunction.

In a podcast for The Spectator, its editor Michael (now Lord) Gove, the former Tory Cabinet minister, recounts the time he was reported for bullying after raising his voice over Home Office delays processing Ukrainian refugee claims.

He also reveals the existence of ‘listening circles’ within the Home Office where staff can talk about their feelings.

It isn’t hard to see why it stumbles from one crisis to the next, including the accidental release of one of the most high-profile prisoners jailed this year.

Hadush Kebatu was sentenced in September for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in July in Epping, Essex, where he had been living in an asylum hotel since arriving in the UK on a small boat.

His arrest led to a series of protests in the area, which spread to other hotels around the country housing asylum seekers.

He was given a £500 payment by the Government after threatening to disrupt his deportation to Ethiopia, though he later told Sky News he had tried to hand himself in to a police officer the day before he was re-arrested – but was ignored.

Then there was the migrant who returned to the UK on a small boat after being removed under the woefully inadequate ‘one-in one-out’ scheme with France.

You wouldn’t trust the people who preside over these blunders with a tea round – let alone securing our borders.

As the farce deepens, you can expect more platitudes, more excuses, more demonisation of anyone who dares to speak out – and more migrants flooding into a country which is buckling under the strain.