Andy Burnham’s ‘listening tour’ has got off to a flying start, with some comments about asylum that show just how deaf he is to the public’s fury over illegal migration.

Speaking to GB News, the prime minister said ‘we cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers’, adding that ‘all parts of the country’ need to ‘play their part’.

He’s right on one score. Illegal migration – or asylum, as we’re apparently still compelled to call it – is a class issue. Some of our most neglected towns and cities have borne the brunt of the small-boats crisis, purely because the accommodation there is cheaper.

The injustice is stark. A Guardian analysis in 2021 found that almost one in four asylum seekers supported by the government were housed in just 10 local authorities, nine of which were among the most deprived in the UK.

Burnham knows this all too well. In 2018, as mayor of Greater Manchester, he threatened to block any more asylum seekers being housed in his patch, citing the ‘disproportionate’ burden on the area. Indeed, the north-west of England has more Home Office-supported migrants than almost any other region of the UK.

This has become a recipe not only for anger, but also for unrest. An awful pattern keeps on repeating itself. A community, already on its uppers, lumbered with migrant hotels or HMOs, goes up in flames following a crime committed by one of its newly arrived residents.

The post-Southport riots were like a heatmap of Home Office-imposed asylum accommodation. According to a private cabinet briefing, ‘15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots’ during those grim days in summer 2024 ‘are in the top 20 per cent of local authorities with the highest numbers of supported asylum seekers’.

But the answer is not bussing more Sudanese to Sevenoaks, or more Afghans to Alderley Edge. If anything, the chances of ending up in one of Britain’s more premier postcodes could become yet another one of those ‘pull factors’, making a £2,000 ‘mega-dinghy’ ticket look like even more of a sound investment.

The primary issue with illegal migration is clearly not the uneven distribution of illegal migrants. But rather than leave the ECHR, rip up the Refugee Convention and finally detain and deport those who violate our borders, Labour appears resigned to shifting the problem around.

There is a curious literal-mindedness to how the government is responding to public outrage over asylum. Protests outside of migrant hotels? Let’s move the migrants into HMOs, then! Oh, you don’t like the HMOs, either? Let’s stick them on some old military bases instead! It’s almost like they think we’re mugs.

If Burnham reckons any of this is going to placate the populace, he’s in for a shock. Indeed, the latest place to erupt over the asylum issue is well-to-do Piddington, a village in Oxfordshire, which is threatening to declare independence over plans to stick 1,250 male migrants in the nearby Bicester Garrison – a number almost four times larger than Piddington’s tiny population.

The British people are not heartless, migrant-bashing bastards. They can be incredibly generous to refugees when there is a pressing need, a sense of historical or moral obligation, and precious few concerns around crime or cultural compatibility. Which is why hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Hongkongers have settled here in recent years without anyone raising an eyebrow.

But they’re also not idiots. They know that allowing anyone to claim asylum, provided they can pay a people smuggler enough to ferry them across the Channel, is illegal migration by another name – not least given these people aren’t actually fleeing war, they’re fleeing France.

They also know that opening the door to men, and they are almost all men, about whom we know nothing, often from cultures with frankly medieval attitudes towards women, is unlikely to end well. The now daily stories about horrific sex attacks committed by illegal migrants, have revealed, once again, the wisdom of the masses and the wilful blindness of our virtue-signalling elites.

No one voted for mass and illegal migration. Voters don’t want the effects of it shared out more equitably across the income scale. They just want it to stop. One day they might get a government that is actually willing to listen.