There is still too much we don’t know about the Liverpool bomber, who died in a burning taxi outside a women’s hospital on Remembrance Sunday. We know that Emad al-Swealmeen had been assembling bomb ingredients since April, and that he had suffered episodes of mental illness. But police still aren’t sure whether a hospital full of mothers and their newborn babies was really his intended target, or what twisted motivations drove him. We know he tried and failed to claim asylum, exhausting his rights to appeal reportedly in early 2017, but it’s unclear how he managed to avoid being deported after that. And we know that terror attacks in the past have caused spikes in hate crime, which is why Liverpool politicians appealed for calm in the emotionally charged aftermath of the attack. The home secretary, however, seemingly had other ideas. Briefing reporters on a flight to Washington, Priti Patel announced that the case was “a complete reflection of how dysfunctional, how broken, the system has been in the past”. Note that vague “in the past”, from a politician whose party has been in power for 11 years now. But then she added: “It’s a complete merry-go-round, and it has been exploited … There’s a whole industry that thinks it’s right to defend these individuals that cause the most appalling crimes against British citizens … and that is completely wrong.” Whether deliberately chosen or clumsy, those words were only ever going to be read as casually conflating asylum seekers more broadly with dangerous criminals, while frantically shovelling blame away from her department. One Home Office source even accused churches of failing to stop asylum seekers converting to Christianity, as al-Swealmeen reportedly did, to bolster their cases. A Conservative government willing to throw vicars under the bus is a rattled government indeed. What’s most shocking is that Patel has been warned before about the risks of stoking such emotions. Last autumn a London law firm raised concerns that a speech she gave, accusing “activist lawyers” of obstructing deportations, may have helped inspire a knife attack on one of its solicitors. (Lefty lawyers supposedly frustrating the popular will are a favourite Tory target, not least since it’s thought some of the dirt rubs off on ex-barrister Keir Starmer.) But the more details emerge about this particular case, the more cynical that statement looks. The Liverpool bomber was reportedly refused asylum in 2014 (when he apparently claimed to be Syrian, although a relative now says he was born in Iraq) and, after losing an appeal in the lower courts, had his attempt to appeal to the higher courts rejected. When asked how he had seemingly managed to stay in the country, the best a Home Office source could offer was that there were “many varied reasons”. Patel has not, at the time of writing, come either to the House of Commons or to Liverpool to explain her thinking. But the home secretary was already under intense political pressure over the growing numbers of migrant boats crossing the Channel, and it has become painfully clear of late that neither threatening to push dinghies physically back to France nor picking fights with her French counterparts was working. She will know she now risks being outflanked on immigration from the right, which is what she was sent to the Home Office to avoid. The GB News presenter Dan Wootton is already frothing about a supposed “establishment conspiracy of silence” over immigration, language calculated to irritate people who voted for Brexit expecting to regain control of Britain’s borders. His fellow presenter Nigel Farage, circling vulture-like over a troubled government, evidently sees a chance to get back in the political game. “Is this Boris Johnson’s definition of being ‘vigilant’ against security threats?” he tweeted recently, over pictures of a laden lifeboat purportedly arriving at Dover. A better government would have the moral authority to challenge this kind of bile, which feeds the dangerous notion of refugees being a threat to the countries that take them in. But this administration has seemingly chosen to follow him down into the mire. Some might feel a kind of grim satisfaction in watching the Home Office get hoist by its own petard, but this sort of politics produces absolutely no winners. People will keep on drowning at sea, even as the Home Office floats desperate-sounding stories about deterring cross-Channel migrants by sending them to be processed in Albania (something that Albania has angrily denied). Voters will become yet more cynical about what politicians promise versus what actually happens. Some people will go more fearfully about their daily business in the coming days just because of the colour of their skin, while as the human rights barrister Adam Wagner tweeted, “lawyers will get targeted by angry members of the public”. And few will explore what’s really wrong with a creaking asylum system. By chance, this week the Commons human rights committee was taking evidence on the government’s nationality and borders bill, intended to speed up the asylum process amid evidence of a backlog of cases piling up, as well as stiffening the sentences for people smuggling. According to the committee’s chair, Harriet Harman, it heard asylum seekers were now waiting on average a year even to hear back on their applications, during which time most cannot work and their lives are hanging in limbo. Zoe Gardner, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, told Harman’s committee it was seeing “people completely broken down who have become a shell, years later, asking when they will hear”. The sclerotic and under-funded system she describes sounds broken too, but in a very different way from Patel’s assessment. What, if anything, all this might have to do with events in Liverpool remains to be seen, and the policing minister Kit Malthouse was notably more cautious than his boss when fielding questions on it in parliament. He will doubtless be aware that the terror threat Britain has faced in recent years has come mostly from homegrown terrorists, including those behind the bombing of an Ariana Grande gig in Manchester or the brutal murder of PC Keith Palmer as he was guarding parliament. The national lead for counter-terrorism policing, Matt Jukes, confirmed this week that the vast majority of those thought to be plotting attacks were not foreign nationals but born or raised here. The Liverpool bomber’s case is clearly different, and it isn’t unreasonable for people to ask why he was still in the country, any more than it’s unreasonable to ask why he wasn’t on the security services’ radar or perhaps whether mental health services could have picked up on the threat he posed. But questions like this deserve honest and careful answers, not rattled politicians lashing out or rabble-rousers playing with matches. Tough talk alone will never keep us safe. And worse than that, it risks throwing some of us to the wolves. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist