on social media today asylum backlog cleared. it is just over a year since rishi sunak told parliament he would abolish that backlog by the end of 2023, two days ago, but did he really manage it? the government says the pm s pledge applies only to what it calls the legacy backlog. now, those are asylum seekers who were waiting for a decision on their claim for refugee status before june the 28th 2022 and that bit of the backlog, in the blue here, well, you can see that has fallen significantly, from around 100,000 cases to, well, not quite zero, a,500 are still in the system but now reclassified as complex. and while the focus has been on the legacy bit, another backlog has been growing, the red bars here. new cases in the system now number more than 9a,000, a higher number actually than the one the pm promised to reduce to zero. so with thousands of the legacy group still in the system as well as those new cases, can the government really claim