In the hourly deluge of outrage and nonsense that passes for the national conversation, it was only another fleeting moment. But last Tuesday, as the TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer talked to Ben Habib – the Reform UK party’s “co-deputy leader” and its candidate in the recent Wellingborough byelection – about so-called small boats crossing the Channel, their conversation highlighted where the noise around that issue seems to be going: into places so inhuman and ugly that even a populist true believer such as Hartley-Brewer feels a pang of horror.

Their 11-minute chat took place the day after five people, including a four-year-old girl, had been killed trying to get to the English coastline from a beach near Boulogne, on an inflatable dinghy carrying 112 people. Reform’s belief, Habib said, was that the UK authorities should “use force” to stop such vessels entering our territorial waters, “and require them to turn round”.

Hartley-Brewer asked what would happen if the boat in question wasn’t seaworthy, or if the people clinging to it jumped into the sea. “The presumption in your question is that we have a duty of care to people who are seeking to enter our country illegally,” said Habib. “We have a duty of care to people drowning in the Channel, yes,” she replied. “We do.”

“Let’s not infantilise these people,” he said. “They have free will. They were safe in France: they paid good money to get on a boat seeking illegally to come … And I’m not going to be held to ransom by their claim that they deserve protection as soon as they get into our territorial waters.”

Whether he included children in that swingeing judgment remained unclear. But if people scuppered a boat, he said, they would have to “suffer the consequences of their actions”.

“You would........

© The Guardian