UK should treat Ukrainian refugees with sincerity

Hannah Fearn, The Independent

Sometimes it is the smallest of details inside a news report that tell the bigger story.

Scottish journalist Lindsay Bruce is following the case of two Ukrainian women in Aberdeen seeking to bring their relatives over to safety, but finding themselves thwarted at every turn by the Orwellian bureaucracy of the Home Office. They are trying to complete a complex visa process in a war zone, sleeping with their children in a bomb shelter, only to be told they have to provide photocopied and printed documents for an application.

Where does the UK Home Office expect refugees fleeing gun fire and bombs to find a printer and photocopier? It’s the idiocy – quite apart from the callous immorality – that illuminates how unfit the department has become. It can no longer manage the most basic operations any UK citizen might expect it to: to protect civilians whose lives are at risk in a conflict and offer them refuge.

There’s something novelistic about the Sisyphean efforts refugees with the right to enter the UK are having to make to prove themselves. But even worse is the drawbridge that has been pulled over who does — and does not — hold that right.

Of course, the Home Office is carrying out government instruction in upholding these rules, but it is well positioned to lead a new debate on the rights of refugees — and the UK’s ability to offer refuge.

It is failing to do that because the culture of the department is so eroded. It is no longer an arbiter of sanctuary and security, but a brutal border force that bullies those who question it.

Tony Blair.

In the past decade, there have been endless miscarriages of justice in its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees from across the world. In fact, it is just one month since the Home Office publicly refused to apologise after illegally jailing 12 asylum seekers for steering their dinghies into the shipping canal of the English Channel.

They were labelled “people smugglers” and prosecuted for crimes of which they were innocent. An appeal judge said the law had been “misunderstood” by the Home Office. Deliberately? You might come to suspect it. And all that is before we get to the Windrush scandal.

This culture has been long in the making, starting in the New Labour years with ID cards. In the early 2000s, Tony Blair set out a proposal that would see the policy introduced by stealth, starting with non-EU nationals who applied for a national insurance number. Eventually, the plan was, we were all to have them.

The “modern” identity scheme shifted the onus on us all to be able to prove we had the right to be here, rather than on authorities to demonstrate any illegal immigrants uncovered did not. Chillingly, the policy was to come along with a “national identity register”.

The Home Office drew up the proposals and shilled for them too, putting out questionable press releases about the extent of public support for compulsory ID, which hasn’t been required in the UK since the Second World War.

Under Theresa May, this aggressive stance continued, as immigration became a major election issue. We saw the infamous “go home or face arrest” vans driven around our cities, using racist language any liberal, tolerant government should be seeking to eliminate by consensus, not perpetuating.

It laid the foundations for today’s “this is the best we can do” excuse over admissions of scattering Ukrainians. In 2014, visa services were also outsourced globally. This is said to account for some of the administrative mess seen in recent days during attempts to support some of the Ukrainians with family in the UK.