So, Rishi Sunak is our latest Conservative Prime Minister. If this one’s not your cup of tea, don’t worry – there’ll be another one along in a minute.

Remember Rishi? He’s the man who wasted billions loaning money to criminals and buying useless PPE from Conservative Party donors. The cabinet minister who received a lockdown fine. The Chancellor of the Exchequer who raised our taxes while his family dodged them.

This is the man the Conservatives now expect us to believe is the right person to sort out the mess that they have created over the last twelve years.

It’s not just the country’s finances that have been trashed over that time. Virtually every government department is in chaos.

We’ve got a very vivid example of that here in Ipswich with the announcement that the Government has taken over the Novotel to house asylum seekers while their cases are being heard.

Let’s be clear. No one – including the Government – thinks cramming large numbers of people into hotels, leaving them in limbo for an extended period of time is a good idea. The Government’s policy is to stop the use of hotels. It is a measure of their failure that they are actually opening up more.

The Novotel is the largest hotel in Ipswich and is a major driver of footfall and business as hotel guests spend money in the town. Asylum seekers are not allowed to work and receive almost no financial support, so this is another blow to town centre businesses already hit hard by Covid, inflation and the Cost of Living Crisis.

It is a disgrace that Novotel staff are being made redundant because the Government’s contractors are moving in their own staff.

Ipswich Borough has strongly objected to the Home Office use of the Novotel and we are taking legal action to try and prevent it.

So why does the Government want to use the Novotel?

Quite simply the UK’s asylum system is in chaos. With the fourth Conservative Home Secretary in two months – and we don’t know how long the current one will last – this is hardly surprising, but this is a long-term problem.

The world is a very dangerous place at the moment. It’s not surprising that we are seeing more people fleeing their countries for safety.

Of course, every asylum claim has to be reviewed and this is where the Government is badly falling down – it simply hasn’t put enough resources in place to handle applications in a timely manner.

Just 4% of applications from last year have been processed. There are over 120,000 people waiting for an initial decision on their application – an increase of nearly two thirds since last year. These are the people being housed in hotels.

The Government claims that its Rwanda plan will sort out the problem. It won’t.

The plan is astronomically expensive, costing £160million so far despite not a single person yet being processed through scheme. It is of dubious legality so may never actually get off the ground. Even if it does, the numbers proposed to be sent to Rwanda are tiny compared to the scale of the backlog.

The Government knows its plan won’t work but it is more interested in looking tough than actually solving the problem.

No one is pretending this is easy but making things better in the long-term will require the Government to work cooperatively with other countries. Getting an agreement with France to process claims there would stop most of the Channel boat crossings. Working with other countries to set up safe camps and establishing an international resettlement scheme would mean that all countries would play their part to help vulnerable people in a safer, more orderly way.

But we have a Conservative government that is a laughingstock around the world. A government that isn’t trusted to keep its word. A government that prefers to act tough and insult other countries rather than cooperate with them to come up with workable solutions.

In the meantime, towns like Ipswich – and people fleeing violence – are having to pay the price for the Government’s failure.