Britain’s shameful response to the Ukraine crisis

Perhaps you’re of the opinion that Ukrainian refugees aren’t our problem, that the world has always been full of foreigners doing ghastly things to each-other, and we can’t be expected to change the settled migration policy of our country just because of a war. Perhaps you wonder why, if we’ve been talking about using gunboats to repel boatloads of Libyans or Syrians and were forced to be ‘realistic’ about the number of people we could accept from Afghanistan, we’re now getting sentimental about Ukrainians.

Perhaps you think that taking people in sounds great on paper but someone’s going to have to pay for it – and what with the energy crisis and the post-Covid state of the NHS and the public finances, we can’t, and that we should take care of our own people first. Perhaps you take the view that keeping them out of Britain does Ukraine a favour; that the best thing is for that country’s two and a half million-odd refugees is to stay somewhere nearby like, say, Poland, so it’s a nice short trip home once the war is over.