Poorer areas took their 'fair share' first. Now fairness means richer ones take a turn.

The story

Home Office minister for asylum Anna Turley has defended plans to house more migrants in affluent, middle-class areas, describing the use of ex-military bases as more "manageable" and affordable than hotels. Parish councillors in Piddington, Oxfordshire, have criticised plans to house 1,200 people at a nearby former barracks, but Ms Turley backed using sites in the countryside, arguing that poorer areas had already taken their "fair share." She said 13 asylum hotels are being closed, saving £1billion, and that the government is also looking at former industrial sites and student accommodation. "It is more affordable than putting people in hotels," she said.

The reframe

Notice the word doing the work here. "Fair share" is not a new phrase in this policy area. It was the justification, for years, for concentrating asylum accommodation in the areas that had the least capacity to resist it: cheaper hotels, cheaper land, fewer organised objectors, less political cost to whichever minister signed off on the placement. Now the same phrase is being redeployed to justify moving in the opposite direction, into areas that were, on the government's own account, not previously taking their share at all.

Both versions of the policy are described as fairness. Neither version, on this reporting, involved anyone being asked what a fair distribution should actually look like before it was implemented. The manuscript's account of what happens when a rule is applied unevenly rather than consistently describes exactly this kind of shift: a system that enforces rules unevenly does not reduce wrongdoing, it redistributes it. Substitute "burden" for "wrongdoing" and the same principle describes this story precisely. The underlying problem, that the UK needs somewhere to house people awaiting asylum decisions, has not been resolved by either phase of this policy. It has been moved. First it was moved onto places with the least capacity to object. Now, as those places reach whatever threshold has made further concentration politically costly, it is being moved onto places that have so far avoided it entirely, framed retrospectively as the fair thing all along.

None of this means Piddington's parish councillors are wrong to organise, or that Ms Turley is wrong that hotels are expensive and barracks are cheaper. Both things can be true. What is harder to defend is the idea that "fair" describes a fixed standard here, rather than whichever distribution is currently administratively convenient. A minister can call the first phase fair and the second phase fair without either phase having been measured against the same yardstick at the time it was decided. That is not fairness operating as a principle. It is fairness operating as the label attached, after the fact, to wherever the load has most recently landed.