Well, who knew? I’m shocked. You might need to sit down, I’ve got some terrible, unexpected news:

The UK’s treatment of asylum seekers falls “seriously below” the standards of a civilised society, a report says.

The shock is, of course, that we even needed an Independent Asylum Commission to tell us this.

Any half humane person with an eye on the news could tell you that we hate foreigners if they’re poor and in need and not multi-millionaire tax-dodgers. The stories are legion. Google ‘Yarl’s Wood‘. Google ‘home office dawn raid’. Google ‘home office iraq waiver‘. Spend five minutes on the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns website.

Only those who’ve made that sociopathic leap that allows them to regard human beings as merely figures in newspaper headlines or in focus group polls need beating over the head with a copy of the Independent Asylum Commission’s report.

‘We are a country with a basic instinct of fair play - the system denies fair play to asylum seekers not out of malice but because of a lack of resources,’ says Sir John Waite, co-chairman of the Commission. It’s cock-up rather than conspiracy then, to coin the cliche. ‘Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice’ is another aphorism.

It’s just that, we’ve created an atmosphere in which we regard anyone needing help - whether it be refugees or benefit claimants - as suspect and worthy of our hate. And that’s what it is - it is hate. Contempt. An urge to regard and treat these people as less than human, unlike us.

With that in mind, the above ‘excuses’ don’t convince. When we have a system where our wounded soldiers have to catalogue their bodes like slaughtered livestock, literally having to choose their choicest cuts, those designated less worthy of our empathy by our ‘basic instinct of fair play’ have no chance.