It’s somehow entirely dull and utterly fascinating at the same time.

Dull because it’s hard to imagine something more boring than a giant, grey box, floating in the water.

Fascinating because it’s commanding the discourse of an entire country, and, despite being more than 15,000 kilometres away, has significant links to Australia.  

The Bibby Stockholm, moored in a harbour on England’s south coast, has been called many things this week: a “floating hotel”, a “prison”, a “recipe for disaster”. 

It’s a barge, with hundreds of bedrooms on it.

People are talking about it because the British government has started moving the first of what it hopes will be more than 500 asylum seekers on board.

That’s where Australia comes in.

The number of migrants attempting to cross the English Channel to the UK in small boats has risen from 299 in 2018 to almost 45,000 last year.

It’s prompted the government to adopt a phrase Australians will be familiar with from a decade ago: “stop the boats”.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government says its spending £6 million ($11.7 million) a day accommodating refugees in hotels while they wait for their asylum applications to be assessed.

It says the Bibby Stockholm, which has an on-site nurse, recreational and canteen facilities, and WiFi, amongst other things, is a more cost-effective way of housing single, male asylum-seekers.

The government says asylum seekers are also free to disembark and visit local towns.

Debate intensified on Monday, when the first 15 refugees were moved from their accommodation in Dorset, a county south-west of London, to the barge.

Conditions on board depend on who you talk to.

Rupert Murdoch’s conservative tabloid The Sun celebrated the moment migrants were “finally” taken to the “floating hotel” and quoted one as saying: “It’s OK, I like it.”

But another asylum seeker on the barge told the BBC it was like “Alcatraz prison”, and added, “we feel very bad”.

Robin Cohen, an emeritus professor and former director of Oxford University’s International Migration Institute, has been examining the British government’s hardening immigration policies and rhetoric.

“What we are talking about, is a policy that is designed really for domestic political opinion, perhaps for electoral advantage, rather than to actually solve the problem,” he said.

“Because there are strong indications — not certainty, but strong indications — that what the policy as enunciated won’t actually work or won’t work significantly.

“So it really is, in many respects, a kind of illusion of control, rather than a reality of control.”

‘Stop the boats’ is back

The “stop the boats” slogan had considerable electoral success in Australia, and has been widely credited as helping Tony Abbott’s Coalition sweep to power in Canberra in 2013.

In May, Australia’s former high commissioner to the UK, George Brandis, told British television station GB News it “really annoys” him when people approached the migration debate as if it were “something other than an attempt by the UK government to deal with this evil crime of people smuggling”.

“The way you deal with people smuggling, the way that worked in Australia, is to put the people smugglers out of business,” Mr Brandis, who served as attorney-general in the Abbott and Turnbull governments, said.

At the time of his comments, the British government was in the process of passing laws which mean asylum seekers who don’t arrive via official channels will not be settled in the UK.

Under the Illegal Migration Act, refugees who attempt to cross the English Channel in small boats would be returned to their home nation or resettled in a “safe third country”.

A five-year trial, announced in 2022, would have seen some people in this category sent to Rwanda, however, last month, the Court of Appeal ruled that plan unlawful.

Britain’s Shadow Immigration Minister Stephen Kinnock has said the country’s Labour opposition would continue to use barges to house asylum seekers if it wins the next general election.

The UK began collecting data on “small boat” arrivals in 2018 and, so far this year, more than 14,700 refugees have been detected trying to cross the English Channel in that way.

UK’s massive migration increase

At the same time as Australia’s immigration policies have been criticised — in 2019, then-United Nations commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet described the debate Down Under as “weaponised by misinformation” — countries like the UK are using them as a blueprint.

Last year, after four migrants died trying to cross the English Channel, British Home Secretary Suella Braverman described the incident as a “sobering reminder” of why the government must “break the business model of the smugglers that facilitate the journeys”.

In 2015, after more than 1,300 migrants had drowned in the Mediterranean in a week, then-Australian prime minister Abbott told European leaders: “The only way you can stop the deaths is, in fact, to stop the boats.”

While the Bibby Stockholm and small-boat arrivals hog public debate in Britain, net migration through official channels is increasing sharply.

According to government data, 1,021,000 more people arrived in the UK than left it in 2019.

Last year, that number was 2,414,000.

In a March working paper for Oxford University’s Centre for Migration, Policy and Society, Professor Cohen argued the UK government’s policy was “designed to toss some red meat to the right-wing media, while simultaneously allowing a considerable rise in net migration to stimulate the economy and cover sectoral labour shortages”.

He told the ABC slogans like “stop the boats” never sat well with him.

“Stop the boats, get Brexit done, build that wall was on that Trump used, and so on,” he said.

“I fear a lot of people have fallen for them in the past, and maybe quite a few still are.

“But I’m hoping that the electorates in many countries will gather enough information and become more sophisticated to understand that these three words, slogans are indeed, ways of concealing policies rather than revealing policies.”

‘Recipe for disaster’

Ruairi Kelly spent about six months on board the Bibby Stockholm a decade ago, when it was used to house workers building a gas plant in the Shetland Islands.

Mr Kelly — now a Scottish National Party councillor for Glasgow — had his own room, and described the barge back then as “clean” but “cramped”.

For him, it was a place to “put your head down and eat your dinner” after a long day at work.

But Mr Kelly said its current purpose was a “recipe for disaster”.

“If you were on it, with two or more people to room there the time, isolated from the wider community, not able to work or do much off it, that would be a totally different prospect,” he said.

“I think the description of it being luxurious is a stretch.

“As permanent living accommodation for people who will probably need a great deal more support than what any of us would have required, I don’t think it’s appropriate.

“I knew I was going home after a couple of weeks to my friends and family and I had a wage in my pocket, I wasn’t sat there indefinitely.