When I called Joyce Landry with some follow-up questions for a profile piece I was writing, she appeared on camera over Zoom and told me: "I'm on the Bibby Stockholm".

A couple of weeks beforehand I had been on board the MS Victoria, which was still berthed in Leith but was preparing to leave, finally, after a year in port serving as home to hundreds of Ukrainian refugees.

The ship had also been home to Ms Landry, who lived there for around 10 months to oversee the day-to-day running of life on board.

Perhaps she merely talks a good game - and as a woman in business, who set up a company in a male-dominated industry in 1980s New York, she really has had to talk a good game.

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But she did appear genuinely to care about the people under her watch: she moved from Miami to live with them, she set up a charitable foundation to continue work begun with children onboard.

Ms Landry is the CEO of Landry & Kling, a ship charter company. Specifically the company that chartered the two Ukrainian refugee ships for the Scottish Government.

She mentioned, while I was on board the MS Victoria, that she was also providing floating accommodation for the Home Office to use to house asylum seekers arriving in the UK.

Days later the news of the controversial Bibby Stockholm barge arriving into port in Portland broke and, the day I spoke to Ms Landry while she was on board, the vessel was dominating the news.

It was being framed as yet another cruel and misguided effort from the UK Government to try to deter asylum seekers from coming to the country by creating a hostile immigration environment.

Ms Landry spoke in defence of the accommodation being provided and referenced the success of the two Scottish ships, the one in Leith and the other in Glasgow.

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Having watched the previous clutch of home secretaries - Theresa May, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman - and the increasingly repugnant rhetoric of the Westminster government, I couldn't help but feel dismayed on behalf of Ms Landry's optimism.

Yes, while far from ideal, the Scottish refugee ships had worked as well as possible. Even the Scottish Refugee Council praised the set up on board. The fact that various administrative services had been brought together on the ship - education, work, benefits and health advice were all provided - was hailed as a gold standard service model.

The Scottish ships, however, were designed to be welcoming, to be a haven. To be a literal safe port in a metaphorical storm. No matter the intentions of anyone else involved, the Bibby Stockholm's intent is hostility. It has been chosen to serve as a warning to anyone hoping to seek asylum here: go anywhere but the UK.

The few asylum-seeking people who were moved on board the ship have been rapidly moved back off after Legionella traces were found in the water system; the UK Government has said it does not have a timescale for restarting use of the ship.

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Meanwhile, Priti Patel has published a letter to Suella Braverman, criticising the Home Office for being "secretive" about the timescale for the use of RAF Wethersfield in Essex, one of several military bases earmarked, with the Bibby Stockholm, to house asylum seekers in an attempt to reduce the costs of hotel accommodation.

Patel, one of the key architects of the hostile immigration policy, taking issue with the finer details of hostile plans? The hypocrisy. And yet further sign that the Government, if you'll pardon the expression, is rudderless when it comes to carrying out its pledge to "stop the boats".

Last week was Stop The Boats week and it was a bad week for Governmental boat plans, both big and small. An MP said last week that the Government needs a Plan B on deterring migrants from crossing the Channel in small boats, should the proposal to deport all new arrivals to Rwanda fail.

But now it's a Plan E or F or G. And that's if you don't include Lee Anderson MP's suggestion to invite them all to merely "f*** off back to France".

Rishi Sunak must have been pleased to have had such a snappy soundbite for his five aims of government. Stop the Boats. Yet it's such a deceptively nebulous slogan.

It seems straightforward enough. Stop the boats. It seems measurable and achievable. There are small boats crossing the Channel and once there are far fewer small boats crossing the Channel, you've stopped them.

The Prime Minister's problem is that he didn't stop to first work out how. But, crucially, you are not stopping boats - you are stopping people. It's not the boats that are the issue.

Oh, some politicians made have made some noises about pretending to care about the safety of the men, women and children in these fragile, easily overwhelmed vessels but no one's fooled.

Boats are not the only irregular means through which people arrive - the Illegal Migration Bill, a Draconian piece of legislation, applies to those who come in ferries, cars or lorries too.

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According to the Refugee Council, last year 70,000 people applied for asylum having travelled this way. Does anyone really believe we can fly all of these people to Rwanda?

If there were genuinely concerns about saving lives then there would be no nonsense talk of resurrecting Ms Patel's plan to use jet skis to turn small boats away from land and back to the ocean, risking life and limb.

All of these plans are nonsense, of course. To stop people coming you have to give them a reason to stay where they are.

Britain has been reducing overseas aid for years now. The only tactic that will stop the boats is investment: both in the civil service to help clear claim backlogs, and in overseas development.

Big boats will make no difference to small boats, only humane policies will. It's desperate that the thought of humane governance from this government is so far-fetched as to be laughable.