Mm.

And that happened, that coinciding not entirely coincidentally with the moment of, um, austerity max.

And, you know, you get to 2016, and you have Schauble turning up in Greece saying, you know, "You can't have, um, uh, the i- financial ability to keep the lights on or the hospitals working." And I remember being there at the time and, uh, helping out in social clinics of, of, that had sprung up because the healthcare system had collapsed.

But meanwhile, you can have resources to stop people crossing borders and- You know, you run that algorithm for a few years, and then you add in the climate crisis to all of this, and you get this kind of telling moment a couple of years ago where the Greeks are fighting wildfires with no firefighting equipment because it's all been done in by 2015 era austerity.

But what they do have is all of the policing and migration funding that the EU was willing to grant to them, which resulted in them having water cannons, which are terrible firefighting platforms, but the only thing they had.

And so you've got this like cop water cannon struggling to fight a fire that's like burning down a village.

And at the same time, you have people displaced by the floods and the fires of that summer and Greek locals who are then corralled into a migrant detention center because there's literally nowhere else to put them.

Yeah

And I guess I just wanted to let you talk, give you the microphone about how you got there and also like how this relates to the kind of rubber meeting the road we're describing in the United Kingdom.

Well, yeah, thanks, Nate, and thanks for having me on.

Around the same time as the Piddington stuff was happening, there was something else going on on the south coast where we had a couple of lifeboats in the channel that picked up 140 people in a boat in distress.

And the lifeboats were refused access to the first two ports that they attempted to disembark in, causing them to end up at a port where the hundreds of people masked agitators who'd been in Dover earlier turned up and spent the best part of a day and a night trying to prevent the disembarkation, getting into the water, harassing the lifeboat crew, so on and so forth.

And in the days following, you get this surge of far-right attacks on lifeboat crews.

It gets to the point where Jordan Wiley, former ambassador for the Army cadets in Extreme Adventure, hardly a sort of open-borders radical, is getting is having to speak out because of the scale of death threats he's getting targeted with.

And again, coming back to what I said earlier about Britain lagging behind, this kind of attack on maritime rescue is something and the basics of life saving at sea is something that's like really taking off now in the last couple of years in Britain, but has been the case in, in Europe for a long time.

You mentioned that the Italian, I believe you said the Italian Navy or the Italian Coast Guard had changed rules so that if one of these volunteer rescue missions rescues anyone, a boat, wherever, they immediately have to head to the nearest port or whatever port they're assigned to then bring the people they've rescued for processing, which is very deliberately done to curtail their ability to make multiple missions while at sea to get as many people as possible, which seems like it's intentionally driving up the risk that people who do need rescue will not be rescued and will be left to die.

Who are the corporate winners of the deportation boom?

Yeah, I mean, where do you want to begin? The New Statesman cover story last week was quite interesting.

It's about Serco, this huge bloated outsourcing firm that, among many other things, runs temporary accommodation for asylum seekers in Britain, often at a very high cost to the state whilst keeping people in very poor conditions and also whilst we suffer from a chronic housing shortage across the board.

So you just have this system that fails for everyone.

You have people seeking safety being held in awful conditions.

You have taxpayers angry about the inflated amount of money that is being spent on migration.

And they've also got another 200 million, I think, for GPS tagging asylum seekers, which is a worrying step for a range of reasons.

Nathan, what would it look like for governments to take a constructive approach to asylum? And is anyone actually doing it?