Rt Hon Sir John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): The Home Secretary has a lot of support on the Government Benches for the compassionate and sensible way in which she is going about this. Will she confirm that she is listening both to what the refugees want, which is often not a long-term settlement a long way from Ukraine, and with regard to the security issues that this all poses?
Priti Patel, The Secretary of State for the Home Department: My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I must emphasise that every single crisis requires a bespoke and unique response. There are two very big calls coming from the region and from our counterparts. First and foremost, they are asking for help on security measures right now; that consistent theme is coming over. That comes down to checksâthey are undertaking checksâbut they are also very concerned about wider security issues, some of which I simply cannot discuss in this House, for clear reasons. The second pointâeven the Ukrainian ambassador made this point to me yesterday and I hear it every single day from my counterpartsâis that there is a call to keep people in region. There is a big demand for that, and that is where the wider aid effort has to focus, in addition to the work that we are doing on humanitarianism.
March 8, 2022
There should be a new science, devoted to the study of collective madness.
There’s been quite a lot of it in recent years, from the preposterous delusions of the brexit herd to the rabid criminality of Trump’s storm troopers to the general flakiness of the anti-vaxxers.
Why should the Russians be immune?
But we could at least do a bit more to ease the symptoms meantime.
March 8, 2022
Groupthink especially in state organisations is indeed a huge problem especially when so few of them understand science, logic, reason or economics and work on religion or gut feelings. Many also bombarded with or even paid by vested interest groups. Though your examples are rather poor. Better would be Net zero, the climate change act, Blairâs idiotic & damaging wars, the ERM, the EURO, Joining the EU, the Millennium Dome, Heat PumpsâŠ
For example read Charles Moore today:-
âWhy block energy wells just when we need them?
Yesterday contractors began to arrive at Cuadrillaâs Preston New Road site in Lancashire. They are there to clear the place. Next Monday, they will start the process of pouring concrete into the only two horizontal shale gas wells in Britain, and keep on pouring until they will never be usable again. It is an eco-punishment, as vengeful as the Romans sowing the defeated Carthage with salt.â
It is also not needed for any safety or other reasons and why is it being done in such haste. Energy vandalism and total economic and political insanity from Boris, Carrie(?), Kwarteng, Hands and the regulators. Not one of them has any understanding of energy, science or energy economics. Or indeed of the politics of huge energy prices.
March 8, 2022
Let us hope Farage or someone else can organise a protest against this government eco-vandalism & the concrete trucks in Preston. Would be a shame if it set hard actually inside the trucks!
March 8, 2022
Perhaps you want a vaccine mandate, to impose your preferred antidote.
March 8, 2022
You think you are always right NHL
Every post shows you have a hard left world view.
You have in this post just described your own position.
March 8, 2022
love it …..of course he is always right.
Anybody would leave Nottingham for Cardiff. But still hanker for NZ, China or Malta – where things are done as they should be.
March 8, 2022
What was the ÂŁ400 million for? Why not set them up near where they come from in a safe country?
March 8, 2022
Yes, keeping people in the region is very sensible. We have 6m (SIX MILLION) EU citizens now in the UK, plus Afghans, Hong Kongers, and others from all over the world. The 6m EU citizens residing here have created spare homes in their home countries, whereas we have ZERO spare housing resulting in hotels full of immigrants, and a lack of infrastructure to support any more people. I understand the population of some EU countries is decreasing, whereas our is expanding rapidly. Also, the Ukrainians will want to return home eventually, so the nearer they are to home the easier it will be. They will need every available person to help rebuild.
Where are we supposed to put more immigrants or refugees? Build more hotels or sacrifice more farmland to housing? When we expand our population we need to increase our food production, not destroy it further. Maybe if the existing and preceding governments had not been so eager to encourage mass immigration we would have more capacity for genuine refugees.
March 9, 2022
I guess I am not as amusing as Andy and NHL, and everyone else it seems! My posts often end up in permanent moderation. I have often wondered why! My posts are far from the most scathing and you even allow massive porkies from those mentioned earlier. If I tell any porkies you are free to respond, as you do with Andy & Co.
March 8, 2022
So, checks on Ukrainian refugees who have documentation and demonstrate their respectability by presenting themselves at border control. This often results in delays and severe distress. He said thousands were being processed. That was another of his distortion of language. He has absolutely no conscience over his failures over truth and accuracy.
Yet those who cross the channel illegally and having deliberately destroyed their papers are helped over immediately and provided with all manner of benefits. He said he would stop this but has done nothing but talk.
This is an example of the hypocrisy, deviousness and deceit displayed by your party’s government and leaders the whole time.
And on another topic Boris made a comment yesterday about increasing gas extraction. Another attempt to fool the people because he has no intention of allowing extraction on land which is ready.
The fact that you are too frightened to challenge him directly and publicly is your disgrace.
March 8, 2022
The Governmentâs Economic Crime of the century so far is to pour concrete down the only immediate source of UK fracking gas going on right now as if Putin had personally requested Boris to allow it.
Madness – utter folly in the face of common sense.
March 8, 2022
+1 Political insanity too.
March 8, 2022
Bespoke and unique response?
What has she done regarding the dingy invaders? Three fifths of sod all.
Not a lot of hope then for the Ukrainian wanting to come her
They have a 80 majority and are afraid to use it to repeal the very laws that are causing the problem.
Pass a law that nobody entering this country is eligible for any handouts or government support for a minimum of three years or until they have been legally employed and paid contributions and taxes for a minimum of 30 months.
Those who have been deported get a second chance to cross again apply to stay and its given.
March 8, 2022
Also bear in mind Zelensky has issued arms to all and sundry to repell invaders-and in news just breaking from multiple sources-that c450 ISIS fighters are today being airlifted from Idlib in N Syria to participate in the Ukraine war;transiting via Turkey but not on the Turkish payroll apparently.
March 8, 2022
Surely if people can prove they are from Ukraine, and can prove they have family members here, who can house and support them, and all can verify such with some sort of official proof of identity, why hold them up, they are after all proper refugees. !
The boat people on the other hand who seem to have no proof of anything, and who appear to be simple economic migrants from goodness knows where, who fund the criminal people smugglers, seem to be helped and treated with the utmost generosity, at huge taxpayers expense.
We seem to have our priorities wrong yet again.
March 8, 2022
Alan. You are so right.
March 8, 2022
+1
March 8, 2022
+1
March 8, 2022
The boat people – as you call them – mostly have their asylum claims accepted in the end. They may be fleeing from different conflict but their stories are the same. They are forced into dangerous journeys by the policies you vote for. The main difference between someone fleeing from Russian bombs in Syria and someone fleeing from Russian bombs in Ukraine is that the Syrian will probably be a bit browner.
March 8, 2022
Rubbish
They travel from a dangerous zone through many safe countries to get to the UK.
Why do so few ever return home?
March 9, 2022
The difference Andy is not the colour of the skin, but the fact that Ukrainians in the main are are women and children, and the others who you suggest are refugees, are mainly young men of fighting age who have deliberately destroyed any records of who they are, and where they have come from.
The fact that they then still may get approval of entry, is down to the failure of our own system, which is unfit for purpose.
March 9, 2022
So where are their women, children and old folk? Not the same at all, and they are coming from the fabulous EU not being bombed out of France.
March 8, 2022
It is good to know that the Home Secretary appreciates that this latest humanitarian crisis is much more complicated than the ‘Let them all in regardless’ cries from the Opposition and much of the press, imply.
March 8, 2022
It isnât. Anyone that needs refuge here should get it. And if the angry minority you represent doesnât like it we could always send you to camps on Ascension Island.
March 8, 2022
Any limit?
1 million a year?
5 million a year?
March 8, 2022
Andy. Can you be first?
March 9, 2022
You are in the minority and always irrationally angry. I guess thatâs why.
March 8, 2022
The most glaring thing which apparently the Home Office cannot see is the difference in the treatment of mostly women and children who are likely to be no threat to us and are escaping genuine war are put through a bureaucratic nightmare to get here and the channel hoppers, mostly young men who come with no documents from a free country are welcomed and put up in hotels with full board and spending money. Is this ‘Woke’ reverse racism? Is it because these people are predominantly white and so do not fit the government’s list of Woke priorities?
March 8, 2022
The problems faced by Ukrainian refugees are the same problems faced by all refugees who try to come to the UK. The government you vote for has made it as hard as possible to seek sanctuary here. Why? To try to appease the angry Faragists who vote for it.
It might make it easier in your head for you to think there is a difference between the elderly woman fleeing from Russia cluster bombs in Kharkiv and the young Syrian man fleeing from Russian cluster bombs in Aleppo but their stories are essentially the same.
We treat refugees appallingly because you vote for people whose policy it is to treat refugees appallingly. Itâs sad that you need the refugees to actually look a bit like you before you realise how callous you have been all these years.
March 8, 2022
and the common denominator is …..?
need help Andy? think cluster bombs, think Russia?
March 9, 2022
Except that the young Syrian men (if that is what they are, I have doubts) are already in a safe country. Not the same at all as the people coming from Ukraine.
How many are living in your French Chateau that we have say we have stopped you going to? Are you treating them any better by opening your doors?
March 9, 2022
Should read ‘you say we have stopped you’
March 8, 2022
+1
March 8, 2022
Thinking of crime, at TCW Conservative Woman today there is an article entitled ‘ The Story of how Ivermectin was cancelled ‘ (with the full collaboration of the government in my view) and an eighteen minute video. That cancellation shows what the present cabal really thinks about us.
March 8, 2022
I was interested to see that the, usually certifiable, posters on Breitbart were right on Ivermectin and were also right about loss of taste and smell being a harbinger of COVID. If there’s a lesson here, it’s that the chants of the mob can sometimes convey more than a grain of truth.
March 9, 2022
Not sure about harbingers, SW, but we surely all know that you may lose a sense of smell and taste with a common cold. But then of course, SARSCov2 is a cold virus, so that’s not surprising.
March 8, 2022
Will be interesting watch the class lawsuits work through once they have enough of the data released.
-mandatory injections or indirect legal persuasion or threats
-assertions that no alternative therapeutics were available.
-and of course the actual data. How safe etc compared to no vax.
-this war is sure a distraction.
March 8, 2022
At least this time the very dubious benefit of a long answer.
But what has the HS actually achieved so far?
March 8, 2022
So âAsk and it shall be given to youâ.
Doesnât work for the 280,000 U.K. homeless does it?
Wonât work for our energy and tax payments either.
March 8, 2022
Under the vile British political and bureaucratic class even LIFE’S BECOME A CRIME
The term ‘crime’ has NO meaning at all except as a political weapon of war against liberty, freedom and the civil population
March 8, 2022
I am worried about the impending speech by the Ukrainian President. I anticipate that he will try and drag this country further into the conflict. And that once he has fnished, the usual suspects in the Commons will pile in and demand that we do more. We are already providing financial aid, military aid and, soon, refuge. We have put in place a strong sanctions package – some of which will damage us more than Russia. And, with much of the West, we have endangered our energy security. This afternoon, I want to see the Commons keep calm and think about what it says.
March 9, 2022
He held back but they didn’t. Instead of demanding war, they demanded open borders, and chaos at Calais. They conceal the fact that 1,000 young men a day are crossing from France with no identity, and want the women and children of the Ukraine to mingle with them and the gangsters. And just imagine if that were encouraged and the women and children were given preference, fast tracked, as they have been in their own country! There would be unmitigated hell to pay. There is no more hideous sight than the House of Commons venting its hatred against the Home Secretary.
March 8, 2022
The obsession with criminalising the so-called Russian ‘oligarchs’ is becoming a modern-day Salem witch hunt and is totally abhorent to any decent person. The argument that these people are ‘friends’ of Putin is nonsense: he doesn’t have any friends. Besides, even if they are his ‘friends’, this guilt by association is immoral and evil. We are told that the proof that they are his ‘friends’ is that he made them rich, but that’s not true either, as most became wealthy under his predecessor, Yeltsin. We are then told that they ‘prop him up’, but everyone knows that he is effectively a dictator, and a murderous one too, so the idea that he needs them is laughable; he can expropriate their property and send them to the gulag any time he wants (and has done to those who oppose him!) which is the very reason they have moved out of Russia in the first place!!!
We have the ghastly Labour MP Chris xxxxx Bryant trying to persecute Roman Abramovich, but tell me this: how does forcing Abramovich to sell Chelsea football club help stop the war in Ukraine? It’s not as if Abramovich makes any money out of Chelsea – quite the opposite! He has poured billions into the club, and gained nothing (except, presumably, a degree of pleasure). So his ownership of Chelsea is hardly helping the Putin war machine, was it? And now we have the children of these wealthy Russians being forced to leave their private schools or their universities in Britain – where presumably they were learning British values, as well as the curriculum. How is this penalising of children fair? How does it help Ukrainians who are being shelled? No, this is an immoral witch hunt, designed purely to make the West feel virtuous when in fact it is being evil.
Far from pushing the oligarchs away we should be WELCOMING them, inviting them to come here, to take their money OUT of Russia and to put it into the UK instead. We should offer them UK citizenship, so that they make Britain their home. This would benefit us and would distance them from the Russiam regime.
March 8, 2022
How to respond to a question and say nothing of substance. Deja vu.
Except of course we are dealing with fellow traumatised human beings at their moment of greatest need.
March 8, 2022
We have had channel winds of F4 to 5 and above for nearly a month so it would be interesting to know the number of boat crossings for February. I would hope well down.
Tonight off Calais it is blowing 12 to 16kts gusting 14 to 24kts from the South East. The surf will be slight but once clear of the land (3 miles or so) it will be rough especially when the easterly tide is running which it will be until 0130 hrs approx.
March 8, 2022
âcompassionate and sensibleâ ⊠ass-licking good (as they would say in KFC). Shame on you, John.
March 9, 2022
I guess the same compassion and sense forcing those on low incomes to âwear more clothesâ because of the rise in energy prices party caused by Tory MPs supine acquiescence to the drive for Net Zero.
As ever MPs line up to virtue signal and grandstand but are happy to break promises left right and centre and trash the living standards of the people who elected them.
March 8, 2022
Sorry, off topic.
I am hearing that former Speaker of the House, John Bercow has had his HoC pass revoked.
He brought shame to the position of Speaker and to the House of Commons.
March 9, 2022
Actually he bought shame on the political parties and demonstrated the swamp that is Westminster because they would have known, indeed as we thought but now confirmed, but continued to place their political needs over the many employees whose lives he made intolerable.
March 9, 2022
MarkB: “I am hearing that former Speaker of the House, John Bercow has had his HoC pass revoked.”
Surely the key to that sentence is ‘former’, why should these freeloaders keep access to the house of commons bar when they no longer sit in Parliament?
Wikipedia: “After resigning as Speaker in 2019 and opting not to seek re-election as MP for Buckingham in the 2019 general election, Bercow left Parliament. In 2021, he joined the Labour Party but was suspended in 2022.”
Even the Labour party couldn’t stand the man.
March 9, 2022
He did indeed bring shame on the office he was wrong headedly given, and on Parliaament, but what he says about the watchdog and her process is correct. It is a kangaroo court and it does get rubber stamped. And the watchdog is unqualified for a quasi judicial role. He was lucky though in getting an appeal with a retired judge.
March 8, 2022
There is a story on the Beeb website where a Ukrsnian woman living in the UK has travelled to Poland to help her mother apply for a visa.
She describes the centre as understaffed and suggests that a riot is likely to break out due to frustrations.
I put it to that woman and other refuge seekers that if you can’t queue nicely you will not like it in the UK and we will not like you. Find somewhere else would be my advice.
March 9, 2022
Standing in a queue for a bus or to get served in a shop is not the same as standing 3 hours in minus 3 degreesC and they won’t even open the doors. The excuse being that the building owners don’t want a mass in there. Perhaps the whole story is a bit different to your interpretation as being petulance.
March 9, 2022
We are doing them a favour – the favour is delivered on our terms not the recipients.
March 9, 2022
“We”.
It’s almost funny.
March 9, 2022
The most callous thing I have heard. Hope you are proud of that remark and attitude.
Anyway, it’s not our terms, it is pure incompetence by a Minister out of her depth and a department that was described 20 years ago as not fit for purpose.
March 8, 2022
The EU has been seeking ÂŁ1.7billion in compensation from the UK to the EU budget. On Tuesday, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) concluded that the UK âfailed to fulfil its obligationsâ in relation to customs control by failing to âcombat fraud with regards to undervalued imports of textiles and footwear from Chinaâ.
https://www.gbnews.uk/news/uk-broke-eu-law-on-customs-controls-european-court-of-justice-rules-as-17billion-bill-looms-large/242965?fbclid=IwAR28UVa47NCHGCUwyroQqe3rY7-mMU8ud2QiZr_y5VXMFkY1SL1rk6bwSUs
There you have it folksâŠwe havenât leftâŠâŠÂŁ1.7billion would pay for the shortfall of every councils budget in the UK
March 8, 2022
The daughter of a Ukrainian refugee has warned of the anger and frustration of people waiting for visas at an “understaffed” UK application centre. Marianne Kay from Yorkshire says if delays continue much longer “it does feel like there will be riots”.
Pity the spirit and energy required to raise a riot hasn’t deterred those Russians.
March 9, 2022
Nothing deters soldiers led by a lunatic, on pain of being killed if they don’t. People are being locked up and face 15 years in a gulag for merely saying it is wrong. The Ukrainians have shown more spirit and energy and courage than anything you’ve ever done, I’d wager.
March 8, 2022
I see one of your Parliamentary colleagues Alec Shelbrooke demanded in the ‘Commons that the Homes Office “get a grip”!
He is of course quite right but where has he been for the last number of years: it has never had a grip, being unfit for purpose. Why does it take Ukrainians in distress for this to be noticed when our own population has suffered from its complete lack of grip for a long time now?
March 9, 2022
The topic is too complex for me to have an informed opinion, however I read a commentator saying she is in political trouble because of an alleged failure to set the visa project quickly and efficiently enough.
Obviously the Secretary of State does not set up and run the project requiring her civil servants to do it.
Are they useless, we saw the FOâs failures in Kabul or deliberately being difficult/going slow as push back for the way one of their âluvviesâ was treated by Patel before lockdown.
Has her agreement to âbe nicer, neutered her ability to drive projects hard? Indeed is this a metaphor for HMG across the whole of the civil service?