Evening Standard Comment: End the chaos — we must welcome refugees fleeing Ukraine
They escape any way they can. By train, car, even on foot. Two million Ukrainians have now crossed the border into neighbouring countries, in doing so becoming refugees from Vladimir Putin’s war. Poland alone has taken in one million.
Britain is relatively far away but is expected to take its share of desperate people in their hour of need. Yet the Home Office says it has granted only 300 visas, despite more than 17,000 applications.
It gets worse. Ukrainians in Calais hoping to come to Britain have been reportedly greeted not by a bustling processing centre but a table in an empty hall containing chocolate bars and ready salted crisps.
The UK has pledged to take in more than 200,000 refugees fleeing the Russian forces, but only with a visa. The EU, meanwhile, is offering Ukrainians the right to live and work in the bloc for three years.
This morning, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted the Government “can do more” and offered to send British military personnel to accelerate the process, including rolling out pop-up visa centres.
The Government needs to get a grip. It careers from position to contradiction, with a Home Secretary suggesting a more generous policy one day only to be seemingly overruled the next. It is chaos and little short of a national embarrassment.
One only has to look at the donations by ordinary citizens to see how strong the desire is to help our Ukrainian friends. The mismatch between the action of the people and our Government has rarely been starker.
The message to ministers is clear and urgent: sort it out.
