Home Office response to Ukraine crisis is woeful and inhumane - Christa Ackroyd

In a matter of days during the pandemic this country built emergency Nightingale Hospitals that were mostly never used. Our government boasts of the rapid rollout of a vaccination programme, which they rightfully claim saved thousands of lives.
Ukrainian refugees wait for a train after crossing the border during snowfall to Medyka, Poland. Picture: Adam Gray/SWNS.Ukrainian refugees wait for a train after crossing the border during snowfall to Medyka, Poland. Picture: Adam Gray/SWNS.
Ukrainian refugees wait for a train after crossing the border during snowfall to Medyka, Poland. Picture: Adam Gray/SWNS.

In the last week or so it has talked endlessly about providing £400m of military aid for the Ukrainian army fighting a bloody war. It stood to applaud that country’s president who historically was invited to address our parliament. It was a show of unity on all sides of the house.

So for the love of humanity what on earth has gone wrong with our help for the millions of refugees, the vast majority of them women and children, fleeing from their shattered country to one that has always prided itself on having given their forefathers a place of safety after the Second World War?

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There can be no excuse for the pathetic response to the visa crisis which would allow Ukrainians, many of them old and infirm or mothers with their children, to come here to lay their heads for a while after the traumatic scenes they have witnessed, after the bullets they have dodged to try to get here.

There can be no excuse as to why the Home Office has chopped and changed its refugee policy which has seen desperate people turned away. There can be no excuse for people being told to make their way to Calais to find ‘not today thank you’ notices advising them to travel hundreds more miles to other towns and cities to apply for sanctuary.

And now, if they have any strength left, tell them they can now apply online. What have we been playing at?

This horrific war has been going on for two weeks, its horror unfolding before our eyes day after day, night after night. In the first few days Ukraine’s hero president thanked Britain and America for early warning that Putin’s evil invasion was going to happen.

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Which meant we have known for weeks that it would. So what has the Home Office been doing in terms of planning for the millions that we also knew would flee as their towns and cities fell around them?

The Home Office organisation, or rather disorganisation, has been woeful. It has been embarrassing and above all inhumane. As thousands of British volunteers work round the clock providing and shipping aid, many risking their own safety to take it to refugee camps themselves, we can’t even sort out visa applications for a few thousand people as other countries, Poland in particular, allow in millions. Because that is the right thing to do.

Our system, if indeed you can call it a system, in this country has been described by politicians on both sides as embarrassing. I would call it disgraceful. The excuses have changed too, from claims that those fleeing bombs and bullets don’t want to leave, to the fact that they may get mixed up with other asylum seekers in the Calais camps. Or worse still that our reticence, or rather inability to get our act together, is to protect us from Russia spies.

Okay Priti Patel, nice try. Here is my response to the feeble excuses made in the past few days. Over the past decade or so we haven’t done a particularly good job of protecting this country from Russia spies who have killed or poisoned on our shores.

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We have failed also to protect this country from the onslaught of dirty money from Putin’s supporters which has propped up his corrupt regime and which too late we are now trying to trace and freeze.

We did nothing when he marched into Crimea in 2014 but give him false encouragement to do the same again on a much wider and bloodier scale.

And to suggest that these innocent women and children might somehow pose a threat to our national security is monstrous.

As for the offer that maybe they could come here and pick fruit, they are not coming to provide cheap labour for jobs that may be considered beneath us, but to seek sanctuary from a regime which targets innocent civilians and who doesn’t care whether they live or die.

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This week it was International Women’s Day. Have we ever witnessed stronger or braver women that those in Ukraine? In Russia too as they risk imprisonment there to demonstrate against the monster in charge.

We have seen so many women young and old in Ukraine who have stood before Russian soldiers demanding they leave their country and their people.

We have seen women clutching little ones and running from the debris that was once a maternity hospital. Women who have travelled hundreds of miles and queued for hours in the snow to hand their children over to those who would offer them safety and then many turn around and return to stand by their men to fight a dictator.

A dictator, who, on International Women’s Day, as we thought of those women and children he was murdering, addressed the wives, mothers and girlfriends of his soldiers to thank them for their bravery, soldiers who were told they were going on a peace keeping military rescue operation, not to target the vulnerable and the infirm and anyone else who gets in his way.

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Britain is the sixth richest country in the world. Moldova is one of the smallest and poorest. Yet they have already taken in 82,000 refugees which is around 80,000 more than we have.

Well Madam Home Secretary I know this country is better than that. It is up to you to allow us to prove it. We care. We want to open our doors and say come in you are welcome. Even if you do not.