Here’s your guide to what happens every time the government tries to sort out the so-called small boats crisis.

A fresh batch of morally suspect policies will be introduced to a drumbeat of headlines. These will turn out to be just as useless as the last batch of morally suspect policies.

There have already been endless initiatives and six new bills aimed at stopping people entering the UK – all since 2015.

The last one, the nationality and borders bill, pledged to end small boat crossings for ever, only for last year to see a record 45,000 arrivals.

You can also count on a tweet from Gary Lineker, the sports commentator and scourge of the government. This will earn him a fresh rebuke from the BBC, get right-wingers hot under their buttoned-up collars, and land the Daily Mail another lazy splash.

What Lineker said this time may well seem entirely sensible to you. It certainly does to me…

“There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?”

And if you think that Lineker was being over the top with his “Germany in the 30s line”, look at this government propaganda…

A “whole new level of UKIP Stalinist”, as the comedian David Baddiel put it on Twitter.

And again, look at this horrible and yet entirely mystifying bit of government PR.

What does that even mean?

The latest government plan after all the others that didn’t work effectively bans anyone who arrives in the UK ‘illegally’ from claiming asylum (it is already near impossible to arrive here legally). Prime Minister Rishi Sunak says in that droning tech-bro way he has that he is “ready to battle judges” through any legal challenges.

Now we come to whichever mean-spirited sprite happens to be Home Secretary.

Suella Braverman, the appalling present incumbent, went on the BBC this morning to condemn Lineker, saying: “I think it’s unhelpful to compare our measures, which are lawful, proportionate and indeed compassionate, to 1930s Germany. I also think that we are on the side of the British people here.”

Pondering this new spin on the word ‘compassionate’, I give Lineker a follow, adding to his tally of 8.7 million (Braverman has 120,000).

Here’s what also happens. The ins and outs, however cruel and unseemly, have to be seen alongside the reason why they are being proposed.

It’s nearly always the fault of Nigel Farage, that skid-mark on the underpants of British life.

Farage, you may recall, posted selfie videos as he stood on the shores of Dover, pointing at asylum seekers arriving in small boats – like some sort of misery pervert, a peeping tom getting off on the suffering of those less fortunate than himself.

Farage has a way of banging on about something for so long that the media takes note (see Brexit). Now everyone is doing a Nigel and pointing at the “small boats”.

Here’s what also happens. Our morally tacky government doesn’t mind at all that there is an endless racket about migrants. In fact, it loves all that noise.

If we exhaust ourselves pointing at small boats, we turn our eyes from the self-destructive Tory party and the unravelling chaos it has caused, at the failing state, the collapsing NHS, the non-existent trains in the north, or at all those friends of the government who enriched themselves from fast-track contracts during the Covid crisis.

Here’s what also happens. No one in government listens to those who know what’s really going on. Here is a telling statistic from the Refugee Council: “The UK is home to approx. 1% of the 27.1 million refugees who were forcibly displaced across the world.”

One per cent is hardly an invasion. Braverman, more bonkers by the day, claims that 100 million people could seek asylum here if her bill isn’t passed. That’s “think of a number” politics of the lowest kind.

All of which proves that the small boats crisis is a distraction – a political confection topped with the whipped cream of easy hate.

Here’s what also happens: you always end up thinking, we should be better than this.