There’s a strange pattern in how the UK discusses policy, and once you notice it you realise it’s everywhere. What happens is that there’s a problem, often something which makes us less safe. The problem will be fundamentally a result of policy, and often something we’re ‘forced’ to endure because of laws we have created. No one feels able to step outside our existing legal or conceptual framework, and often they don’t even really feel able to name the problem. So they propose a weird solution which just creates more costs and burdens, often falling on law-abiding Brits. Then the entire debate will take place within this limited space, ignoring the real problem and real solutions.

This pattern was apparent in the weird campaign to make it harder for us to buy knives, in the wake of Axel Rudakubana’s trial. We saw it again in the summer when the government spent a huge amount of time and energy negotiating a so-called ‘one-in, one-out’ scheme with France in an effort to reduce the numbers of illegal migrants crossing the Channel.

Today’s example is the suggestion by Katy Bourne, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Sussex. She’s concerned about the 540 asylum seekers due to arrive at Crowborough barracks in Sussex next year, and has asked the Home Secretary to ‘be bold and pilot tagging of the men due to arrive soon at Crowborough’. Bourne apparently believes that tagging asylum seekers would deter them from committing crime and give them ‘greater freedom’ to travel further afield and even get temporary jobs.

The problem Bourne is trying to address is that none of us want hundreds of foreign men overrepresented in crime statistics imported into our towns and villages. The actual problem is that they’re here at all. But Bourne isn’t willing, or able to grapple with that, so instead she’s pushing a confused idea which would cost a great deal and do no good.

The Home Office have responded to this idea, saying that it would breach asylum seekers human rights to tag them all, and in any event such an undertaking would be impractical. Then a charity, ‘Refugee and Migrant Justice’, which received £1 million in government grants last year, joined the debate, saying it would be ‘cruel’ and ‘punitive’ to tag asylum seekers, before going on to argue that we should just let these new arrivals join the labour market instead.

It’s tempting to be drawn in to this debate, to argue with this nonsense on its own terms. I could tell you that no one involved seems to really understand how tags work, because even the GPS ones are not monitored live, so this will just mean that when an asylum seeker commits a sexual assault, rape or murder it will be slightly easier to prove they did it. I could tell you that it would be cripplingly expensive, with a year’s worth of asylum seekers costing over £2 billion a year to tag, and that money would just flow to one of the big outsourcing companies and their shareholders.

But the reality is that all of this is a distraction. The problem is that over 100,000 people a year, mostly men, are claiming asylum here. They commit a great deal of crime, as a result we see absolutely justified protests and unrest. The asylum system itself costs billions, and we now know that the fiscal impact of these arrivals is ‘unambiguously negative’, with each successful asylum seeker devouring the median British taxpayer’s lifetime contributions.

There’s a simple switch which would fix everything, and so much of the media and policy debate seems to exist to prevent us from noticing, or pressing that switch. All we have to do is change the law, stop accepting asylum seekers and all of this goes away. The hotels full of strange men. The vast costs we’re loading on the country. The petty crime. The sexual assaults. The rapes. The murders.

The Refugee Convention and human rights laws are not geographical features which we must live with forever. They, and indeed all laws, are tools. We made them, and if we decide they no longer serve us then we can simply replace them with laws which do. So instead of inventing weird, expensive and ineffective solutions to these problems of our own making, let’s make 2026 the year we press the fix everything easily switch.