Boris Johnson could end the inhumanity of Britain’s treatment of Ukrainian refugees today. He need only say that the UK will do what every European Union country has done and grant them temporary protection. No visa forms designed to catch you out. No insolent officials throwing up obstacles. Just come. You are welcome.
Hungary is virtually a Putin puppet state, but had taken 530,000 Ukrainian refugees by the end of March. Ireland’s neutrality periodically disgraces it, but nevertheless it expects to house 30,000 by Easter. Hungary’s population is a seventh of the UK’s. Ireland’s less than a tenth. Yet, as of last week, the UK has accepted just 12,000 refugees.
We are imposing visa restrictions because opposition to the free movement of Europeans has become a neurotic obsession for our ruling class. If we were not so in thrall to American notions that racism solely consists of white supremacy, we would recognise the lethal prejudice for what it is.
For a generation, Europeans have been the British right’s “other”. The mythical European “superstate”, not the actual Russian empire, was the UK’s greatest enemy. Opposition to the explosion of immigration after Tony Blair’s government allowed freedom of movement to eastern Europeans gave victory to the right in the Brexit referendum of 2016 and general election of 2019. Even a terrible war cannot blow away the conviction that to win Conservatives must hammer European migrants.
I want to emphasise the political nature of the decision to slam the door in Ukrainians’ faces. Too many people writing about the restrictions have lost themselves in the wilderness of the Home Office bureaucracy, from where few emerge with their sanity intact. But if Priti Patel and Johnson had ordered the civil service to drop restrictions on Ukrainians, it would have done so and got on with the arduous job of finding them accommodation.
Instead, they calculated that maintaining rightwing support required spreading conspiracy theories as malicious as any they spin against people of colour. “White privilege” is a useless concept when dealing with the racism Europeans inflict on each other rather than on the descendants of their former colonial possessions. Worse than useless, in fact. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum and today, it allows the cynics in charge of our politics to plausibly deny that they are engaged in race-baiting. How can they be when their targets’ skins are white?
Remember that the latest polling gives Labour a nine-point lead over the Conservatives on immigration. Rightwing opinion has been outraged by the Johnson administration’s failure to keep its impossible pledge to stop boats filled with asylum seekers crossing the Channel. Like David Cameron claiming a decade ago that he could reduce net migration to the tens of thousands, vainglorious boasts are eating away at Johnson’s support. When war began, the political imperative to stop migration from eastern Europe by any means necessary appeared overwhelming.
For all that, demonising Ukrainian refugees challenged even this government’s dark storytellers. They were overwhelmingly women and children, whose men had stayed behind to fight. They were fleeing an unprovoked invasion, by – and since we were talking about colonialism – a fascistic imperial power. The world could see the crimes against humanity the Russians were inflicting on civilians.
Undeterred, Patel insisted that among the desperate and traumatised were Russian spies. “I’m afraid it is naive and misguided to think that only men can be covert operatives,” she told a Conservative party conference last month. “There are those who would come to our country, who would mean us harm and who plot to strike at our very way of life.”
Read that disgraceful justification for visa controls again and compare it with the Russian state’s attempt to brainwash its subjects into believing Ukrainians are Nazis. There is the same contempt for evidence. Patel does not say where she found Russian spies among the refugee exodus because she cannot. Note too the sheer implausibility of both claims. Why would Nazis create a free society with a Jewish leader? How could Russian intelligence benefit from smuggling a mother of two into the spare room of a Northamptonshire rectory?
Nothing made sense apart from Patel’s warning against those who “mean us harm and who plot to strike at our very way of life”, which perfectly captured the cabinet.
Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, told me that the only meaningful security check Patel could run is one that takes seconds at international airports: scanning a passport and seeing if the owner is on a watch list. No one would have raised the smallest objection if she had done so. Instead, Conservative ministers used an evidence-free scare about an invented Russian plot to abandon the victims of war.
British citizens who offered to open up their homes have found their own government is bent on blocking their generosity. Traumatised people strung out along the European rail system or still waiting in Ukraine must navigate Whitehall regulations on their phones. Inevitably, most cannot find a way through dozens of pages of forms and document upload demands, and abandon their plans to come to the UK, which suited the government just fine, until it realised to its evident astonishment that it had bet on the nastiness of Conservatives and lost.
A significant number of Tory voters have not thanked the government for treating them as racists. It turns out they meant it when they said they welcomed genuine refugees and, as far as they could see, Ukrainians fleeing Putin’s bombs were just that.
From Enoch Powell to Brexit, the popular complaint has been that liberal-minded governments have opened up the country to immigration without so much as a by your leave from the governed. As Sunder Katwala of the British Future thinktank says, whether it is with Afghans who served British forces or Ukrainian refugees, voters are now turning on this government for not being liberal enough.
Patel and Johnson realise their mistake and are in the grotesque position of pretending that no one is as frustrated as they are at the cruelties of their own system.
If they meant it, they would announce today that Britain will match the European Union’s generosity to Ukrainians. They won’t because they cannot escape the fear – or should that be the hope? – that when British people say they want to do good in the world, they are lying.
• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist
