The Guardian view on Ukraine’s refugees: Britain’s grudging welcome
“I think the UK is ensuring that all the Ukrainians don’t come.” Those words, from a refugee in Warsaw, sum up a broader mood. One in four Ukrainians has now fled their home, and at least 4 million have left the country. They have found a warm welcome even in places that generally reject and denigrate refugees. But a relatively small number have reached Britain, and frustration and anger at delays and obstacles are growing.
Just 2,700 visas have been granted out of more than 28,000 applications under the “homes for Ukraine” scheme. Another 23,000 have been granted under the family scheme allowing applicants to join relatives in the UK. But in both cases, lengthy waits and what Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, described as Kafkaesque bureaucracy are leaving tens of thousands in limbo and increasingly desperate, with some still in areas under bombardment. British humanitarian workers at the Polish border said that while other nations have been helping refugees find new homes for weeks, not one of 70 visa claims they have assisted with has been approved.
The government can take no credit for the fact that around 200,000 people in the UK have now registered as potential hosts, under a scheme that it had to be arm-twisted into introducing.
Households are being given no assistance in matching up with those in need – a process being left to social media or charities – and Ukrainians are receiving little help as they tackle the official obstacles to actually reach Britain.
While ministers say that they have cut back on the documentation required, more substantive action is clearly required. Several major charities, including Oxfam and the Refugee Council, are calling on the government to waive visas, with security checks carried out on arrival.
Scaling up processing is not simple. Underlying the delay and bureaucracy is an asylum system that is geared not to supporting the traumatised, but to rejecting those who come in search of help, and which is underresourced and beset by inertia, because the people at its heart are neither valued nor respected. Ministers continue to treat refugees as a political problem rather than as vulnerable human beings – stoking the hostile attitudes to which they are pandering. In this context, even when the government grants a group special dispensation, they are almost certain to struggle, be they the Ukrainians now fleeing war, or the Afghans evacuated when the Taliban took power last summer, around 11,500 of whom are still stuck in hotels, waiting to find new homes.
“This is a country overwhelmingly generous to people coming in fear of their lives,” Boris Johnson insisted on Wednesday. Households across the UK have shown that they are willing to open their hearts to desperate Ukrainians. If only the government would do the same.