Prohibition

I think I've come up with the only potentially workable solution to the 'migrant' 'crisis': we need to change the name of our country. I'm thinking instead of 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' we go for something like 'The Unbearable Cesspool of Shit Britain and Eternal Dispair'. If we're working on the whole discouragement aspect of migration prevention, then we really should make sure it's the things that people actually know about our country that we use to discourage them. I'm willing to bet that in most cases that is probably little more than what it's called (and I'm not sure they'll even know all of that*). 

Clearly people don't seek asylum in a country based solely on its policy towards asylum, otherwise they would all head straight for Sweden. Britain is already a pretty rubbish place to seek asylum, due to our propensity to send failed asylum seekers to countries that the UN deems unsafe to return anybody to. If the Tories get their way it will virtually be better to have stayed in your country and be bombed/starved/tortuted to death than risk life, limb and spectacular amounts of money to get to a country where you will be deprived of your basic human rights and watch your children be treated like some sort of vermin before you're all flown back to your country of origin to be bombed/starved/tortuted to death anyway. Don't these people know this before they attempt to come here? Don't they read the Daily Mail? "We're not animals," they shout as they attempt to break through the security fences at Calais, to which the rational response is: "then stop trying to get to a country where you will be treated like animals." 

People don't try to come to Britain because it's a soft touch, they come because 200 years of effective colonial and post-colonial propaganda have presented the UK as a pinnacle of civilisation. Unfortunately, it seems that no matter what we do to reverse the actuality of that - repealing human rights legislation, treating our own poor like criminals, etc - it doesn't change the perception that we are much more civilised and tolerant than we actually are. Therefore I think the government needs to take decisive action, by changing the county's name to something more befitting the tinpot dictatorship that they are aiming for. They definitely need to include the word 'democratic' just to make it clear that only the rights of the elite are truly respected, maybe they can chuck in the word 'peoples' just to clarify who doesn't own it. I think the oppressed peoples of the world understand the true meanings of such words when employed in the name of a country, so the sooner we chuck a few in to the name of ours, the sooner they'll get the message that Britain really ain't that great anymore. 

*I don't mean that in a disparaging way; most people in this country don't know what it's actually called.