Evening Standard Comment: End the chaos — we must welcome refugees fleeing Ukraine

Christian Adams
WEST END FINAL

Get our award-winning daily news email featuring exclusive stories, opinion and expert analysis

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

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.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in