The process for allowing Ukrainian
refugees into the UK has been much-criticised, entirely justifiably, at a time
when urgent action is needed to help those displaced by the war. Uniquely in
Europe, the UK government is still insisting on people completing complex visa
application forms before being allowed entry. The government insist that this
is necessary for ‘security’ purposes, but have failed to provide any sort of
explanation as to why that is a great concern here, but not important for any
member state of the EU. It's probably just another example of English (and it
is English in this case – both the Welsh and Scottish governments have called for
a more flexible approach) exceptionalism – they probably do genuinely believe
that England needs to be more careful than anyone else. Perhaps they even think
that the ‘hostile environment’ which they’ve spent so much time and effort
creating somehow makes the UK uniquely attractive.
It has certainly been made clear – even if
it was not so previously – that the UK’s process, even in the case of people in
desperate need, starts from the assumption that people (with the possible
exception of corrupt billionaires) must be kept out. It’s not an admission
process, it’s an exclusion process. The pathetically slow UK approach has,
however, thrown a little bit of light on the standard process, which involves
completing a 51 page form for each individual. When I first read about how long
the form is, I found myself wondering how on earth anyone could actually devise
51 pages of questions in the first place. Part of the answer has emerged in
recent days: one
of the questions asked is, apparently, “Are you a war criminal?”.
Whilst it’s easy enough to understand why any country might want to think twice
before admitting war criminals, I can’t even begin to imagine the thought
processes of the civil servant who decided that the way to find out was to include
the question on an application form. The one thing of which we can be certain
is that any war criminal seeking entry to the UK who gets to that question is
not going to answer in the positive, a rather obvious fact which makes the
question completely pointless.
It made me wonder anew what other silly
questions might be included in the form, the very length of which is clearly
intended as a deterrent in itself. We are supposed to accept that government
efforts to ‘simplify’ the form for dealing with Ukrainian applicants (reducing
it, apparently, to a mere 30 pages) is a demonstration of the government being
flexible and accommodating. It’s actually more a demonstration of how the whole
UK immigration process is about building the biggest possible barriers to entry (barriers which would have excluded
the parents of the current Home Secretary as well as those of a number of other
government MPs and ministers) and resisting any and all attempts to lower those
barriers.
1 comment:
“Are you a war criminal?”. Good question. Some alert civil servant obviously has his/her eye on filling jobs selling British armaments to dodgy autocratic and pseudo democratic regimes. After all, a seasoned war criminal will be able to draw on his/her depth of personal experience when advising some dodgy Saudi prince on how a piece of kit can kill even more innocents in places like the Yemen.
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