Be grateful you’ll never have to call on the UK Home Office for help

People seeking asylum in Britain are absolutely meant to meet a wall of bureaucratic pain. They’re meant to have hope extinguished by dysfunctional processes that take months, in the hope that they’ll decide not to come here at all

This is not the first time in even remotely recent memory that terrified people have been running for their lives from Russian bombs (AFP/Getty)

He’s a busy man, at the moment, Volodymyr Zelensky. When he makes his historic address to the House of Commons on Tuesday evening, he probably won’t have gotten round to watching any of his warm-up acts – and that’s just as well.

It’s also just as well that he almost certainly hasn’t heard of Kevin Foster, the junior Home Office minister sent to the despatch box to try – and fail – to explain away the rolling shambles (we’ll come back to that) that is his department’s attempts to sort out the visa scheme for the two million and counting Ukrainian refugees of which, at time of typing, just 300 have been granted the right to come to the UK.

If he has heard of Kevin Foster at all, it will almost certainly because he had to delete a tweet in which he explained, rather impatiently, that, actually, it was wrong to say there was no route to the UK for Ukrainians fleeing the bombings of their homes, because, actually, there was the “seasonal worker” scheme, in which they could come here for a few months, just as long as they wanted to work as fruit pickers and then go home again.

Yes, we’ll come back to that shambles to say that actually it’s not a shambles. Well, it is, but it’s deliberate. It’s not a shambles because they don’t know what they’re doing. They do. This is how it’s meant to be.

People seeking asylum in Britain are absolutely meant to meet a wall of bureaucratic pain. They’re meant to have hope extinguished by dysfunctional processes that take months, in the hope that they’ll decide not to come here at all. It’s obviously stupid, because the people that flee here, the people that board unsafe boats, do so because they’re already out of luck and out of options but not quite yet entirely out of hope. It’s just that an old-fashioned and extremely brutal war in Ukraine seems to have been necessary to make some people understand that very basic point.

The stories of Ukrainian families trudging across Europe, desperate to reach the safety and security of Britain, only to get to Calais and be told to turn back, should profoundly shame us as a country. Of course, there are aspects of the crisis that the government has handled well, chiefly in donating weapons. The stuff that we find easy, in other words. In doing the easy thing, we have certainly “led the way”. But the stuff that we find hard, that really should be easy, which includes basic human compassion, we understandably trail far behind.

Maybe it’s wrong to seek to weave a thread of causation through the following, but the correlation is certainly there. This is not the first time in even remotely recent memory that terrified people have been running for their lives from Russian bombs. Russia began bombing Syria in 2015, turning to maximum intensity the Mediterranean refugee crisis in the months that followed.

It was in this rarefied moment of terror that came the Katie Hopkins “cockroaches” column in The Sun newspaper. Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster. As it happens, I went knocking on doors in Somerset with Jacob Rees-Mogg around about that time, when a man came up to him in the street with The Sun newspaper under his arm, pointed at the front page, featuring an Italian naval ship in the middle of the Med and the latest horrifying death toll and said, “I probably shouldn’t say this but I’m glad they’re dying.”

Rees-Mogg told him he was wrong, and that it was “an appalling thing to say”. But it is not an unfair reading of history to say that the unimaginable suffering in the Med, and the cheap politics of immigration that could be made off the back of it, got their little Brexit voter over the line. (When Angela Merkel granted asylum to a million Syrian refugees, Nigel Farage waved his British passport in anger. “In three years’ time, they’ll all be EU citizens and they can all come here. Nothing we can do about it.”)

But for all that, this government would probably have never come to pass. When Sir Edward Leigh stood up in the House of Commons last week and said that, actually, “Lincolnshire has already done its bit with regard to immigration from Eastern europe,” the ugly fact is that, for a great many people, he spoke the truth.

In the Commons, backbench MPs took it in turns to stand up and read out angry letters from desperate constituents with families scattered across the continent, in varying states of fear and panic.

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There was a certain sense of déjà vu. It is barely a few months since the same happened in Afghanistan. There is a slight twist, however. Back then, Dominic Raab had us believe that he had no choice but to stay put in his Corfu villa and run the evacuation effort from there, rather than waste precious hours travelling home again.

This time around, Priti Patel has found the time to go and stand near the Poland/Ukraine border, doing a sad face about the suffering all around her, but not quite able to do anything about the fact that, as of now, there are no appointments at the Home Office’s emergency visa centre in Poland until the end of next month.

And what has she done about the horrorshow of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Calais and being told to go back to Paris or Brussels to have their paperwork dealt with? Well, there is now another emergency visa centre, in Lille, which at noon on Tuesday Home Office officials were denying existed until Liz Truss accidentally announced it in the House of Commons while being asked a question about something else.

It’s shocking, of course it is. It’s a national humiliation. A few days ago, Fisher Price My First Atlas-botherer Dominic Raab was trying to explain that the UK is a long way from Ukraine so it’s not surprising we haven’t had many people come here. On Monday, John Redwood stood up in the House of Commons to explain that lots of Ukrainian people don’t actually want “long-term settlement status, a long way from Ukraine” so it’s better not to offer it, and also better to just ignore the fact that almost two full weeks ago, Ireland immediately waived all the paperwork requirements we are still struggling to demand.

It’s shocking, but don’t be shocked by it. It’s absolutely how it’s meant to be. Mainly, just be grateful. Doubly grateful. Grateful not only that it’s we’re not running for our lives, but also grateful that should we ever have to, we won’t have to call on the UK Home Office for help.