Who – or what – is the British state for? Is it there to defend our territory, control our borders, protect the citizenry and safeguard our liberties? Don’t be silly. Broken-borders Britain dispensed with such old-fashioned notions a long time ago.

Last night, we were provided with yet more proof that the only thing the state is any good at these days is ferrying illegal migrants into the country, while keeping them well away from the locals. The arrival of another ‘mega-dinghy’ in Gosport led the authorities to scramble a motorcade of buses, police vans and ambulances to aid the migrants’ smooth passage to processing centres in Kent, while imposing sweeping restrictions on protest in the surrounding areas.

This was the third attempted landing in Hampshire in a month, more than 150 miles west of the usual Dover-Calais crossing. Clearly, the boats aren’t stopping and what measures Labour and the French authorities are taking seem to be pushing the routes further westward, making them more and more perilous and inflicting this crisis on more and more communities across the French and English coasts.

This was also the third time in a month that these unwelcome visitors sparked spontaneous protests by locals and activists, furious that the authorities are, in effect, facilitating illegal migration. With the government unwilling to crack down on the boats, it again fell to the police to crack down on the demonstrations. Yesterday, Hampshire Constabulary imposed a series of draconian orders, limiting any protests to a single car park, banning face-coverings and allowing the police to order anyone to leave the area, or otherwise risk arrest.

The optics could hardly be more toxic. A group of 150-odd men break into Britain and they are given the state-visit treatment. A group of residents kick off about it and they are herded into a protest pen and threatened with a night in the cells. The government’s failure to control the borders is forcing the state to take drastic measures – not to stop the boats or send the illegal migrants back, but to try to put a lid on public fury.

If nothing else, it’s clearly not working. Last night’s protest came and went without much incident – even the Guardian report concedes it was ‘mostly peaceful’. But the sense of injustice fuelling them certainly isn’t going away. After all, this farce is going on at a time when public services are creaking, ambulances take an age to arrive and the police will only attend the scene of a crime if the crime in question is a misgendering. The images of all those blue-lights vehicles, escorting men who have no right to be here to their taxpayer-funded digs, is heaping salt into already gaping wounds.

‘Unfair’ doesn’t come close to covering it. The crisis in the English Channel is unfolding not only at the expense of already threadbare resources, but also the safety of British citizens. Two Iranian small-boats migrants were arrested over the weekend on suspicion of plotting a bomb attack against Jews in Manchester. Horrific stories of ‘asylum seekers’ raping women and girls are making headlines on a daily basis. Surprise, surprise, when you allow tens of thousands of men to enter your country illegally each year, many of them from backward cultures ruled over by Islamist tyrants, some of them will go on to commit further, often depraved, crimes.

Worst of all? The government is well aware of these horrors. This is why the Home Office has been handing out leaflets to newcomers instructing them not to rape women, mutilate girls’ genitals or verbally abuse homosexuals. Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has let slip that almost all of the women who arrive on small boats tend to have been sexually assaulted, most likely by other migrants. The powers that be know this is what they are importing, and they carry on with it anyway.

This is your brain on globalism. We are lumbered with rulers who think the legal obligations imposed on them by outdated ‘human rights’ treaties trump the wellbeing of their own citizens and basic common sense. Every man and his dog knows that what is going on across the channel is not desperate souls seeking asylum. (They aren’t feeling war, they’re fleeing France – although, given the nationwide school riots of the past week, some might struggle to tell the difference.) And yet the supposed needs of illegal migrants must forever trump the democratic wishes of Brits, who have voted to take control of the borders at every given opportunity.

What began as a border crisis is turning into a full-blown crisis of state legitimacy. A state that cannot control its borders cannot keep its citizens safe. A state that puts the phoney rights of illegal migrants over the hard-won rights of citizens cannot expect to command Brits’ loyalty for much longer. A state that would rather stop the protests than stop the boats is truly playing with fire.