Middle-class progressives have long proclaimed that refugees are welcome in Britain, confident that the practical consequences of that welcome would fall on someone else. For years the small-boat arrivals from the Channel have been housed overwhelmingly in poorer communities, the kind of places that vote Reform and that the progressive classes rarely visit. The virtue could be performed at a safe distance. Now that arrangement is being challenged, and the discomfort is beginning to show.
Andy Burnham has announced that the distribution of asylum accommodation must become fairer. It is wrong, he says, that the burden falls almost exclusively on the country's poorest areas. From now on middle-class neighbourhoods will be expected to play their part. On the surface the proposal looks like another administrative headache. Looked at more closely it offers something rarer: an involuntary education.
For the first time the people who have treated open borders as a moral absolute will discover what the policy actually delivers on their own doorsteps. The romantic image of the persecuted family fleeing tyranny will collide with the demographic reality of the crossings; predominantly young men, many of whom have already passed through safe European countries. The comfortable assumption that any resistance to this inflow must stem from racism will become harder to sustain once the same resistance appears in leafy suburbs and market towns that previously flew the welcoming flags.
Some progressives will no doubt double down, insisting that any local opposition is still evidence of bigotry. Others will quietly discover the limits of their own tolerance, much as certain Green and Liberal Democrat figures have already done when hotels or former military sites in their own constituencies were earmarked for large numbers of male asylum seekers. The pattern is familiar: abstract solidarity evaporates when the abstract becomes concrete and close.
That evaporation is precisely the point. As long as the costs of uncontrolled immigration could be offloaded onto communities with less political and cultural capital, the progressive consensus remained intact. Force those costs into the postcodes where the consensus is strongest and the consensus itself begins to crack. The only reliable way to cure an ideological commitment to open borders is to remove the insulation that has protected its most enthusiastic advocates from its results. Whether Burnham's plan succeeds as policy is secondary. Its value as a corrective may prove considerable.