The Home Office’s pamphlet for asylum seekers published last Wednesday rightly attracted derision. It amounted to a rather pointless reminder of the bleeding obvious: that sex equality mattered in Britain, and that if while here you committed rape, had underage sex, or bullied your family, you could go to prison and might prejudice your chance of getting asylum.

Social media had a predictable field day. Spoof government pamphlets popped up everywhere reminding people that we had funny little rules against cannibalism, grooming little girls, stabbing and beheading people, and waging jihad.

One might have thought this was the cue to forget this Home Office sodden squib and move on. But no. Andy Burnham and Lucy Powell earnestly doubled down on the need for the exercise. And then Mike Tapp, ex-migration minister under Keir Starmer (who a year ago was busy puffing the one-in-one-out policy as a decisive turning point in immigration control), weighed in with what looked like an even more curious proposal. He said that we should be going further and ‘testing whether people coming here understand these laws’, on the basis that ‘if they do not, then they should not be able to claim asylum here’.

However much ministers want to clamp down on immigration, they are uncomfortably constrained

It’s not difficult to see that this is a preposterous idea. When would the test be taken? What form should it take? Given that those taking it will have limited English, presumably it would be a stupidly simple one, with questions along the lines of ‘Is sex with a 14-year-old (a) legal or (b) illegal? Choose one answer.’

But a test so easy to cram for and cheat on, with model answers no doubt helpfully handed out on the boat crossing the Channel, would be a laughing stock. And that’s before we come to the inevitable lawyers’ field-day. The Home Office already has difficulty enough in trying to make the right of foreigners to stay here conditional on obeying our laws, such as those against rape and indecent assault. If it fancies making the right to ask for asylum depend on the ticking of a correct box on an official test sheet, I sincerely wish it luck.

Furthermore, all this forgets a major point. Initiatives like the Home Office leaflet make sense only against a curious unstated assumption that asylum seekers are predominantly cultural innocents abroad (so to speak) who would be happy to obey our laws once they were politely told about them. But are they?

A few dewy-eyed, open-border people may think so. The rest of us, one suspects, will draw a much more hard-bitten and plausible conclusion. An overwhelming proportion of the would-be migrants who commit enormities here know perfectly well that they are breaking the law: they are acting not out of sweet innocence, but out of contempt for our rules and our culture, and a belief, all too often justified, that if they have their way, they have a good chance of not getting found out or convicted.

Oddly enough, one strongly suspects that Mike Tapp and the ministers who signed off on this hapless Home Office effort know this perfectly well already. It doesn’t take long once you are in office to become hard-headed about immigration and realise that very many soi-disant asylum seekers are knowledgeable, cynical and entirely undeserving.

Why then go to efforts like the Home Office pamphlet and foolish suggestions for useless tests? The problem for the government is that, however much ministers want to clamp down on immigration, they are uncomfortably constrained. The Tory collapse two years ago shoved onto the green benches an unconscionable number of left-wing bleeding hearts from Labour and the Greens who would not otherwise have stood a chance. Add to this the fact that many asylum seekers are Muslim, and a worrying number of constituencies are dominated by the Muslim vote, and, as the whips have doubtless murmured, there could be a very damaging Commons revolt.

And this is without the elephant in the room: human rights. If the government could humour Middle England by making the right to stay here conditional on not committing a serious offence, it would love to. The difficulty is that the ECHR makes this impossible, requiring an individualised and at times forgiving test.

The answer is ECHR withdrawal, as the Tories and Reform have sensibly accepted. But with left-leaning Andy Burnham in control, and the long tail of left-wing progressives in parliament able to make serious trouble, for Labour this is not on. Hence, deprived of the ability to do much that is effective against rampant abuse of our hospitality by those seeking it, the government is reduced to gestures like calling for tests on asylum seekers and reminding them to behave themselves: gestures aimed more at conveying a message that it has the problem in hand than at any actual improvement.

This may temporarily placate backbenchers. As for voters, we will have to see: a matter, one imagines, that Andy Burnham is very uncomfortably aware of.