The PM must take the hard steps on Ukraine – not just the easy ones

Editorial: If Johnson wishes to lead the world in helping Ukraine, he will need to go a lot further and a lot faster on the ever-toxic question of immigration

Johnson himself has, as far as possible, shied away from expressing the anti-immigration sentiment on which his party has depended for its power (AFP/Getty)

Boris Johnson seeks to establish himself – and with some success, so far – as Ukraine’s most important ally, but he will not succeed unless he is willing to take the difficult decisions as well as the easy ones.

The prime minister’s “six-point plan” is good. It includes more humanitarian support, more military support (in the form of weapons and equipment), and more “economic pressure” on Russia, with demands for Europe to “wean itself off Russian oil and gas”.

In the early days of what may yet be a long and intensely miserable war, these are the areas in which the UK has, to an extent, led the way. On the question of military support, Mr Johnson is in some respects fortunate to have a much-admired defence secretary in Ben Wallace. The idea that this appalling outrage could have occurred on the watch of the previous defence secretary, Sir Gavin Williamson, is horrifying to consider.

Mr Johnson has played a leading role in removing certain Russian banks from the Swift payments system. He would like to go further. He also continues to tell European countries that they must end their dependence on Russian oil and gas. Russia currently supplies 40 per cent of the European Union’s oil and gas. In some of the Baltic states, the figure is closer to 100 per cent.

Just 3 per cent of the UK’s oil and gas is imported from Russia. Other European countries are not so favourably located, geographically speaking – that is, in close proximity to both British and Norwegian North Sea reserves. If Norway were to invade Sweden, it is highly unlikely that Mr Johnson would call for Norway to be kicked out of the payments system that is necessary to buy the oil and gas on which this country depends.

Other European countries have simply impounded the yachts of Mr Putin’s favoured oligarchs. But other European countries simply find it easier to act on dirty money. If Mr Johnson wishes to “maximise economic pressure” on the Russian president, more meaningful steps are urgently needed to shut down what has long been known as the “London laundromat”. The UK’s lax regulatory attitude to providing financial services to those seeking to invest their corrupt cash sustains a crucial part of the country’s economy. Anti-corruption campaigners regularly criticise the UK for enabling not just Russian oligarchs but Italian mafia bosses, and all kinds of shady practices in every corner of the world.

More crucially, if Mr Johnson wishes to lead the world in helping Ukraine, he will need to go a lot further and a lot faster on the ever-toxic question of immigration. More than 1.5 million people have already fled Ukraine, most of them to Poland. When similar goings on were occurring in the Mediterranean in 2016, Britain felt compelled to vote to leave the EU. This time round, the world has been moved by pictures of ordinary people in Berlin arriving at railway stations, holding up signs offering rooms for refugees.

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In this country, a Home Office minister has had to delete a tweet in which he said Ukrainians were able to come to this country to work as fruit pickers. The families of British-based Ukrainians have been turned back at Calais as, even at this horrific hour, the Home Office has found itself unable to dispense with the “hostile environment” systems that are such a fundamental part of everything it does.

And one of Mr Johnson’s MPs, Sir Edward Leigh, has stood up in the House of Commons to tell people who are running from Russian missiles aimed directly at their children’s bedrooms that “Lincolnshire has already done its bit for eastern European migration.”

Mr Johnson himself has, as far as possible, shied away from expressing the anti-immigration sentiment that his party has depended on for power (though he couldn’t prevent himself from going there in 2016). If he wishes to show true statesmanship, true leadership, at this time, he must take the hard steps as well as the easy ones.

He should start by trying to drag his party into the present, and by using his skills of persuasion – which are not small – to broaden a large percentage of British minds to the scale of what is required in the present moment, the most important aspect of which is to find deeper wells of human sympathy for the people of eastern Europe.