Disband the Home Office – only then can Britain redeem itself from shame over Ukrainian refugees

It is the only way to put right the last decade – and respond with humanity to the crisis in Ukraine

Where does the UK Home Office expect refugees fleeing gun fire and bombs to find a printer and photocopier? (WFP/Marco Frattini)

Sometimes it is the smallest of details inside a news report that tell the bigger story.

Scottish journalist Lindsay Bruce is following the case of two Ukrainian women in Aberdeen seeking to bring their relatives over to safety, but finding themselves thwarted at every turn by the Orwellian bureaucracy of the Home Office. They are trying to complete a complex visa process in a war zone, sleeping with their children in a bomb shelter, only to be told they have to provide photocopied and printed documents for an application.

Where does the UK Home Office expect refugees fleeing gun fire and bombs to find a printer and photocopier? It’s the idiocy – quite apart from the callous immorality – that illuminates how unfit the department has become. It can no longer manage the most basic operations any UK citizen might expect it to: to protect civilians whose lives are at risk in a conflict and offer them refuge.

There’s something novelistic about the Sisyphean efforts refugees with the right to enter the UK are having to make to prove themselves. But even worse is the drawbridge that has been pulled over who does – and does not – hold that right.

Of course, the Home Office is carrying out government instruction in upholding these rules, but it is well positioned to lead a new debate on the rights of refugees – and the UK’s ability to offer refuge. It is failing to do that because the culture of the department is so eroded. It is no longer an arbiter of sanctuary and security, but a brutal border force that bullies those who question it.

In the past decade, there have been endless miscarriages of justice in its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees from across the world. In fact, it is just one month since the Home Office publicly refused to apologise after illegally jailing 12 asylum seekers for steering their dinghies into the shipping canal of the English Channel. They were labelled “people smugglers” and prosecuted for crimes of which they were innocent. An appeal judge said the law had been “misunderstood” by the Home Office. Deliberately? You might come to suspect it. And all that is before we get to the Windrush scandal.

This culture has been long in the making, starting in the New Labour years with ID cards. In the early 2000s, Tony Blair set out a proposal that would see the policy introduced by stealth, starting with non-EU nationals who applied for a national insurance number. Eventually, the plan was, we were all to have them.

The “modern” identity scheme shifted the onus on us all to be able to prove we had the right to be here, rather than on authorities to demonstrate any illegal immigrants uncovered did not. Chillingly, the policy was to come along with a “national identity register”. The Home Office drew up the proposals and shilled for them too, putting out questionable press releases about the extent of public support for compulsory ID, which hasn’t been required in the UK since the Second World War.

Under Theresa May, this aggressive stance continued, as immigration became a major election issue. We saw the infamous “go home or face arrest” vans driven around our cities, using racist language any liberal, tolerant government should be seeking to eliminate by consensus, not perpetuating. It laid the foundations for today’s “this is the best we can do” excuse over admissions of scattering Ukrainians. In 2014, visa services were also outsourced globally, including to Dubai. This is said to account for some of the administrative mess seen in recent days during attempts to support some of the Ukrainians with family in the UK.

Today, the Home Office bullies the vulnerable in part because it has a bully at the helm. A review into the behaviour of home secretary Priti Patel exposed bullying treatment of the department’s civil service, a matter of apparently little importance to the prime minister – who chose to stick by her despite the findings in 2020. The situation in the Home Office was not created by Patel, but it is perpetuated by her presence and will not be resolved until she is gone.

Patel is used to parroting aggressive anti-immigration lines delivered in tandem with Boris Johnson’s good-cop effort; the pair tried this tack again this week. The PM bafflingly stated the UK had done more than anyone to support refugees fleeing the horrors of conflict, when we have so far accommodated just 300 Ukrainians. Ireland, meanwhile, which has a population of 4 million people, is offering visa free entry to anyone fleeing Ukraine and has already accepted 2,500 refugees and expects more. We know we can do better. We know we ought to.

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What must be surprising to Patel, after being a puppet of the right of the Conservative Party in recent years, is to find herself on the wrong side of her own faction. Even The Spectator has published scathing articles laying bare the moral vacuum at the centre of the UK’s response to the daily growing refugee crisis.

Putin’s patently unjust war, the bombing of a maternity hospital with children laying among the dead, has helped the party find a way back to its ethical roots. Johnson and Patel have been left behind in their neo-conservative project, spouting empty slogans rather than responding to human need. Even members of the cabinet are now turning against the practices of the Home Office.

It can’t be saved; there’s too little to salvage now. The only way to put right the last decade, and to respond with humanity to the immediate crisis in Ukraine, is to disband the Home Office and replace it with a new department, a new team, a new culture. What is already rotten cannot simply be reorganised into efficiency, even into pride.

Here’s a chance to seize a moment of public agreement and do what seems too difficult: start over again.

The Independent has a proud history of campaigning for the rights of the most vulnerable, and we first ran our Refugees Welcome campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and launch this petition in the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we are calling on the government to go further and faster to ensure help is delivered. To find out more about our Refugees Welcome campaign, click here

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