No fan of mafia films, I remember an innocent first encounter with the word “respect” in its gangster sense. It was in the Ipswich branch of Laser Quest, then an exciting innovation to which teenagers dragged you to play infrared shooting games in the dark. “Time to earn some RESPECT!”, yelled the masked-gunman sign.

What? Reared in postwar decorum, I had to recalibrate the word away from years of what adults told us it meant: admiring deference to wisdom, achievement, principle or high office.

Since then, of course, everyone hears the accusation of being “dissed” from anyone even mildly affronted, and now Donald Trump uses the R-word in something pretty close to gangsta-rap sense. As in, “If I become president, the world will respect us like never before.” When JD Vance accused President Zelensky of disrespect, we were well aware that it was in a Don Corleone sense.

As often happens when words twistily evolve, it all made me reflect on the original meaning, in which the strong can respect the weak. Democracy is founded on it: as Tony Benn said, on election day every citizen is equal. Democratic leaders are on sufferance, warily respecting those who put them there. So the R-word swims through my mind now, when many of us feel a bit dissed by the ruling party.

• Andy Burnham ‘disappointed’ by block on standing in by-election

That an unpopular government can use the excuse of an abrupt border reorganisation to allow the postponement of local authority elections for two years is extraordinary. The Electoral Commission says these are not the “exceptional circumstances” named in the Local Government Act 2000.

The Electoral Reform Society finds it concerning that the decision is left to individual councils: with Greens and Reform prowling from left and right, hanging on to your power is clearly in the interest of the 29 councils, so far, that have decided not to call a vote this year. Twenty of them, by the way, are Labour held: in three of the others there’s no overall control.

That word again; it feels like disrespect for 4.5 million voters. Admittedly, local elections always get a low turnout, but at least it’s a choice. The delays feel really opportunistic. Disrespectful.

Probably it has felt worst right now in Crowborough, East Sussex, where mayoral and county council elections are delayed until 2028 (the latter, by the way, led by the Conservatives without a majority). For without consultation, the home secretary Shabana Mahmood decreed that a former military site just outside the town will house 500 single male asylum seekers.

The first few were moved in just after 3am last Thursday, in the dark. More buses arrive, despite local demonstrations and three arrests of protesters who say that it is simply “taking away the voice of an entire community … reckless, unsafe and aggressive”.

Mahmood is, of course, trying to cut the expense and disruption of using hotels in the middle of towns. That certainly brought both protest and some crime, even though those asylum seekers were often families, not just lone males. So Crowborough is uneasy about 500 lonely chaps far from home, not allowed to work, drink on-site or even clean and maintain their own building, yet not contained.

• I was breastfeeding my baby when ICE agents came and grabbed her

Which is to say, not detained. The men are free: they just sign in and out under a “service provider’s security team”, and are promised essential services, with local churches and volunteers allowed to offer, the government complacently says, “activities to encourage asylum seekers to remain on-site”.

But Napier Barracks at Folkestone operated with similar assurances and similar kindly community efforts, yet finally was deemed filthy and unfit for habitation. And come on — what would you do all day, as a fit young man with little more to lose, nothing to do and little sympathy from locals in a strange country and a daily shuttle bus into town for respite?

It is wickedly irrational to presume that every asylum seeker leading this life becomes a thief, or a sexual assailant like Hadush Kebatu or Qais Al-Aswad (who evaded a prison sentence for being “unfamiliar with UK laws regarding physical contact”).

But our dank, anxious, half-baked and poorly regulated system is no way to contain the young single men who are the great majority of all seekers for asylum, and who may kick their heels in this not-quite-captivity for over a year (who believes Mahmood’s “three months only” promise?). Frankly, we’d do better to think through that problem of manhood than to obsess comfortably about TV’s Adolescence and well-fed kids on TikTok.

Watching Crowborough, irritated by being bilked of local democracy and having its cadet force kids shoved off the old base to “parade in a community setting”, it felt worthwhile to glance across the world to see how others cope. In Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Spain it is at least possible for new arrivals to work after only a few months. But Greece, Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Hungary, Italy and Malta have simply resorted to a sharp increase in prison-like detention, often described as “transit centres”.

A report by Equal Rights Beyond Borders and the church alliance Diakonie Deutschland found governments ever more willing to move to full detention, or very restricted movement and extreme surveillance. The report is directed at lawyers fighting this imprisonment, but it is depressing to note how easily, if you aren’t rigorously hard over borders and deportation, a civilised nation gets freaked and panicked and ends up running huge, long-term, poorly regulated prisons: dustbins full of young men growing angrier. Be afraid of what we, and they, could become.