A seven-year-old girl and four adults died yesterday as they tried to reach Britain. It should be a moment for recognition. It should, by any right, be a moment for us to take stock. Nine years ago, when the body of two-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey, it prompted moral anguish. But today, it is barely noticed. There is no soul searching. There is no heartache. There is just a restatement of the same dead ideas in the same barren language.

When he was asked about it afterwards, Rishi Sunak claimed that these deaths somehow justified what he was attempting to do with his Rwanda policy. It would have a deterrent effect, he claimed, and therefore discourage people getting on those boats in the first place. “This is what tragically happens when they push people out to sea,” he told reporters, “and that’s why, for matters of compassion more than anything else, we must actually break this business model.”

His use of the word compassionate is an abuse of language. It is an abuse of the very idea that words have meaning. And more than that: it is an abuse of reality. Britain has been practicing a deterrent policy for years. It has singularly and repeatedly failed to prevent small boat crossings.

This is the reality of our asylum system that lies behind the headlines about Rwanda. It has ceased to work. It is not even designed to work. It is broken, not as an unintended consequence of policy, but seemingly as a........

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