At the start of the week, the Home Office boasted of unprecedented action, declaring breathlessly: “The UK government’s Ukraine family scheme is the first visa scheme in the world to launch since President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.” It was a telling assertion, not only because it is the sort of casually misleading claim we have grown used to from the home secretary, Priti Patel, and Boris Johnson, but also because it expresses a broader truth about the UK’s treatment of refugees.
The statement was factually true – but only because Ukrainians do not need visas to enter the European Union, and the UK had to be strong-armed into broadening its restrictive definition of “close relatives”. More than 2 million people have escaped the war, but the UK has accepted only 760 of 22,000 applications so far. A second scheme, yet to begin, will allow individuals and organisations to sponsor Ukrainians – again, cherrypicking victims of war rather than respecting the international convention setting out their rights. Ms Patel spoke of a new humanitarian route, only for Downing Street to swiftly rule that out. As with the asylum system overall, the approach is grudging, inefficient and overly bureaucratic, in large part because it is designed to keep people out.
What meagre help is being offered has been dogged by confusion and contradiction. The home secretary promised she had “surged a Home Office team” to help at Calais, but families who had travelled over a thousand miles found a few officials giving out packets of crisps, and were told to go to Paris or Brussels to apply. Then a new “pop-up” centre in Lille, still 70 miles from Calais, was announced; it now appears that it will neither take walk-in applications nor offer appointments but deal with biometrics for the “most vulnerable” of these traumatised people. One Ukrainian mother and daughter made eight trips to the UK visa processing centre in Paris, two trips to the British consulate there and one trip to the British embassy. Even after obtaining the correct visas, they were detained for a second time by UK Border Force officials in Calais.
Plenty of refugees could testify to the incompetence and inhumanity of the UK’s asylum system. The difference this time is that across Europe, including in places previously extremely hostile to migrants and refugees, there is greater public sympathy for white Europeans fleeing their homes. The meanness of the UK government’s approach is not new; it is more visible this time, however, because it is not only out of step with domestic public opinion but strikingly at odds with the welcome now offered by other nations. Moldova, one of the poorest countries in Europe, with a population of just 4 million, has taken more than 80,000 Ukrainians.
The UK’s failure to help Ukrainian refugees is not an accident, though its ineptitude has worsened the plight of many. It is possible to have a humane and efficient asylum system, but not when you promote stereotypes of refugees as a threat and a burden. The government has closed off safe routes – while its nationality and borders bill seeks to criminalise those who arrive here by irregular means. Ukrainians are the latest victims of its cruelty.
