The new government announced in July that its contract with the operators of the Bibby Stockholm will not be renewed in January 2025. The decision, presented as part of a plan to reduce spending on the asylum system, was widely welcomed. But those who have campaigned for the barge’s removal did so from widely differing motives. This is perhaps a good moment to review the nature of the disagreements which have arisen on Portland. What has the island, what have we all learnt from this experience?

I would begin with Maria Stepanova: ‘The world we live in is damaged and nearly irreparably broken and… the job of living is the job of reconstruction, of repair work… if you see a hole then darn it as best you can.’ The Russian poet derives this from the tikkun olam of Jewish mystical tradition. Her own texts, she writes, are ‘above all else, connective tissue joining fragments of the lost... a peace-filled craft that fixes and strengthens…’. This feels close also to the ‘small-scale work’ described by Václav Havel in his essay The Power of the Powerless.

So asylum seekers are not permitted to work on Portland but some of them, for example, helped to sort through a photographic archive at its museum. They cleared the gutters there, too, and repainted garden furniture. A youth club’s computer was fixed. Iranian carpenters took up the floor of a church, replaced the rotten joists under it and then nailed the floor back down. When none of the residents signed up to volunteer, Peruvians, Ugandans, Kenyans and ...