Former long-serving editor at the Daily Nation. He writes the weekly Letter from London.
What you need to know:
While most European countries welcomed desperate Ukrainians without documentation, Britain insisted refugees should have visas
To watch the horror of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine day by day has been a painful experience for ordinary Britons sitting safely in front of their television sets many hundreds of miles away. Worse has been a perception of indifference or lack of urgency by their own government to assist refugees.
While most European countries welcomed desperate Ukrainians without documentation, Britain insisted refugees should have visas.
Some 20 days after the invasion began, Poland had taken in 1.7 million of the 2.8 million Ukrainians who had fled Russia’s guns, while Britain had granted 4,000 visas.
French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the UK at an emergency meeting of the European Union. “Despite all the grand statements… the British government continued to apply current rules that meant they did not welcome Ukrainian refugee who wanted to reach Britain, “ Macron said.
The Financial Times described the UK’s refugee policy as “shameful,” and Andy Hewett of the Refugee Council charged that official policy had been aimed for years at deterring people from coming to Britain.
What is important, however, is to differentiate between officialdom and the people.
When the government announced a scheme whereby Britons could open their homes to refugees, more than 43,000 people signed up on the first day and at one point, pressure was so great that the government’s website crashed.
Hosts will receive £350 per month for taking refugees and there will be no cap on incomers.
Ministers said tens of thousands of displaced people could benefit from the scheme.
A government insider described the huge number of volunteer hosts as “a generous-hearted response of the British public”.
The figure was revealed hours after opposition MPs criticised the government’s lack of urgency in helping refugees.
The target for much of the criticism has been the Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
The leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Sir Ed Davey, called on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to sack Ms Patel for her handling of the refugee crisis. He said, “She has answered desperation with delays, crisis with confusion, pain with paperwork.”
An irony of the accusations of indifference which Davey and others have made against Ms Patel is that her own family are immigrants.
Her Hindu paternal grandparents moved from Gujarat, India, to Kampala, Uganda, where they set up a convenience store.
Her parents emigrated to Britain in the 1960s and started a chain of newsagents.
Patel was born in London in 1972.
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What was that we were saying about the horrors of technology?
The problems of a new payment system to use a river tunnel are not on the scale of the Post Office scandal, where 700 employees were wrongly accused of theft, but its errors led a local councillor to brand the situation “an absolute disaster”.
It all started when the Tyne Tunnel in the Northeast of England demolished its toll booths and switched to cashless payments.
The result? Thousands of people complained of online errors and illicit fines.
One case involved a grandmother, Julie Barnett, who was fined £175 for not paying the £1.90 road toll although she lived in Kent and had never been to the Northeast in her life.
It took three months of correspondence before the tunnel operator, TT2, accepted it was wrong, apologised and cancelled the fine.
