Sajid Javid’s cynical headline-grabbing epitomises yet another year of anti-migrant hysteria

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It has on balance been an craptangular year. And lo! Right at its death, the home secretary himself has found room for one more piece of nonsense. Sajid Javid has abandoned his luxury safari holiday to “get a grip” on the “major incident” unfolding off the south coast.

Yes, a veritable Armada of what, three or four dinghies, has been found carrying cold, desperate migrants, many of the unaccompanied children, towards our cold, desperate and increasingly unaccompanied islands.

So Super-Jav has reported for duty! But what can the intrepid minister hope to achieve? Is he notably adept at comforting traumatised infants? Does he have intimate knowledge of shipping lanes that he can pass on to our security forces? Perhaps the extractive capital skills he learned at Deutsche Bank can be put to some humanitarian purpose? I am genuinely puzzled: how does he actually mean to spend his time? Beyond firing off a few emails from his .gov account to make out he’s actually been working?

Ah, perhaps the general cynicism of 2018 has infected my cheerful little heart, but I can’t help wondering if the reason Javid cancelled his holiday was to create headlines about Javid cancelling his holiday, in order to open the 2019 news cycle with fresh new headlines about some sort of terrifying migrant flotilla that requires tough new measures from our safari-spurning home secretary?

A little anti-migrant hysteria is hardly going to hinder Theresa May’s anti-movement agenda, is it? It’s not that we shouldn’t be concerned about human traffickers operating in the English Channel. It’s not that we couldn’t fill 185 talk radio phone-ins and at least 62 episodes of Question Time with hot takes thereon. It’s merely that I don’t remember any Tory ever cancelling a luxury sojourn to deal with, say, the universal credit catastrophe; or indeed Brexit – a production written, directed and orchestrated by the Tory party, starring you and everyone you know.

The story bears an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump’s ludicrous “migrant caravan”, a manufactured emergency that dominated US news headlines for weeks ahead of the midterms. It was cheap, but it sort of worked. Intelligence, as Michael Gove once said of Trump, comes in many forms, and Javid appears to have been quick in other ways too. Already, the BBC is broadcasting members of the public who believe that the coast guard should “blow them out the water” – unaccompanied minors, that is. Job done. But hey, at least all those innocent leopards, hippopotamuses and lions were spared an interaction with the home secretary.

I am sorry if that seems a little downbeat – but wow, it’s been a stinker of a year, hasn’t it? Never have our problems felt so imminent and over-analysed; never have the proposed solutions felt so elusive and underwhelming. The year has brought abundant proof that Facebook is a truly malign influence on our democracy and our collective sanity – yet Facebook’s share price is higher than it was this time in 2017.

It has underlined Trump’s dubious behaviour and the Republicans’ complicity in it – but there has been no breakthrough in the US and his idiotic creed is spreading abroad. It has brought further proof of our destruction of the natural world, the unfitness of our extant measures of economic success, and the increasing power of an unaccountable international plutocracy – but these items are barely on the collective agenda, preoccupied as we are by tiny little dramas whose scripts we know all too well. One small consolation is that Toby Young had a worse year than you did. But I bet you spent more of your year thinking about Toby Young than you’d have liked.

I’m casting back and wasn’t 2016 also somewhat fractious? And didn’t we conclude 2017 in similar gloom? And what does 2019 promise but the reality of Brexit: a made-up problem to occupy us while all the real problems are ignored? We are amid a Great Disruption, during which the only thing we can be certain of is precarity, insecurity and political, economic and technological change. We are no nearer a destination, and there will be no normal to return to either.

But I think some hope can be salvaged. I think we have to learn to be exquisitely careful about what we devote our attention to. This is the business that Facebook and Google are in, distracting your attention towards their products so they can extract your data and sell you on to their advertisers. It’s also the business that Trump and Javid and most politicians are in, and lobbyists, campaigners, right-wing media barons and general loudmouths too.

We are all being pulled in far too many directions at once. And attention is finite – you cannot recover it once it is spent. It is amazing how much basic wellbeing can flow from diverting your attention away from things that aren’t worth paying attention to and towards things that are. This is my new year’s resolution at least. It is time we learned to value this most precious resource.