The government has started billeting again

There's a very old English answer to a government that has run out of room, and yesterday the country watched it come back. When the Crown couldn't pay for the men it had summoned, it lodged them in other people's houses and called it duty. The modern word is dispersal.

The Government can't stop the boats it has promised to stop, and it has run out of places to put the people who arrive. So the plan reported yesterday is to spread them across the country instead: asylum accommodation in every region, rents paid above the going rate where needed, and every council asked to "play your part". The answer came back within a day. Reform and Conservative councils say they will fight the plan in the courts.

England has seen this before. Four centuries ago a king short of money kept an army he couldn't pay, and made ordinary households feed, clothe and accommodate his soldiers and sailors. To the families who bore it, it was exactly what it looked like: the state's failure, delivered to the front door, dressed up as duty.

Parliament's reply became one of the founding documents of English liberty. The Petition of Right, passed in 1628, told the Crown that soldiers weren't to be billeted in private houses without "the free consent of the owner". No consent, no lodging. However pressing the king's need, however noble the language of shared sacrifice, the household's yes had to be freely given, or the answer was no.

The rule was never really about soldiers. It was about what happens to a state's failures when it's allowed to hand them to somebody else. A government that can billet its mistakes never has to mend them. Consent is the discipline that forces the mending: so long as the state must carry its own overflow, that overflow stays visible, counted and urgent, and somebody in an office is paid to make it smaller. Take consent away and the pressure vanishes, because the failure has been cut into hundreds of pieces and left on other people's doorsteps, where no single piece is ever big enough to force a change of course.

Ministers say that spreading the numbers fairly across the whole country is better than piling them onto a handful of poor seaside towns, and that isn't a silly case. But fairness between councils isn't consent from any of them, and a burden divided isn't a burden agreed to. The fair map and the unfair map share one assumption: that the number of people to be housed is weather, something that simply happens to Britain, rather than the one thing a government of the border is supposed to command.

The men of 1628 didn't petition the king to billet his soldiers more fairly, with a better formula and a higher lodging allowance. They made him stop, and made him write the stopping into law, because they understood that a state which can lodge its failures with you has no reason left to fail less.

"Play your part" is what a state says when it has stopped playing its own.

An opinion of the house.