“They treated us worse than the water in the toilet,” said Krzysztof Mikucki, about his experience at British passport control in Calais on Wednesday night. The Polish-born builder, who lives in the UK, was trying to bring his Ukrainian wife and her family to safety, thinking they’d be allowed to apply for visas at the ferry port. Instead, he told the Guardian earlier this week, they were kept waiting for four hours while Border Force staff chatted and laughed among themselves. “At 5.30am they just gave us a piece of paper with a phone number on it.”
Stories like this have proliferated since Russia’s invasion began on 24 February. They have all the familiar ingredients of a Home Office scandal: an overly complicated bureaucracy that seems designed to trip immigrants up rather than help them; rude and callous officials; ministers who appear not to know what their own department is doing. Last week the home secretary, Priti Patel, was criticised by some of her fellow Conservative MPs for giving misleading information when she referred to “support on the ground” for refugees at Calais.
What’s striking about the government’s farcical response to one of the fastest-developing refugee crises in European history, however, is that it is trying to do the right thing. Unlike in 2015, when David Cameron spoke of a “swarm of migrants” crossing the Mediterranean, Boris Johnson’s government has stressed its openness to refugees from Ukraine.
Yet the gap between rhetoric and reality has become painfully apparent – and this isn’t the first time, either. Last August, the government made grand promises of support for Afghans fleeing the advance of the Taliban. Yet thousands of Afghans who made it to the UK languish in cramped and demeaning hotel accommodation – because, the Guardian reported in February, if they find homes of their own then they lose funding for integration. After the Windrush scandal was exposed in 2018, the government promised to generously compensate people who’d had their lives ruined by Theresa May’s hostile environment. Four years on, the compensation scheme is beset by delays and has itself been accused of racism.
Once again, the finger of blame is being pointed at the department responsible for carrying out ministers’ wishes. “Does the Home Office need to get a grip?” asked one BBC headline this week. Debate usually centres on whether ministers or civil servants are responsible for this pattern of failure. In reality, it’s both – but the problem is political at root.
At the start of the war in Ukraine, ministers had a choice. They could follow Europe’s lead and make safe passage for refugees as frictionless as possible, either by waiving visa requirements or by allowing people to apply for visas once they were in the UK. Or they could leave Ukrainians to wrestle with a system that has been designed to treat would-be migrants as suspect, and to squeeze money out of them wherever possible. (As an example of how petty the system can be, it costs £2.74 to ask a question by email of UK Visas and Immigration – the section of the Home Office that manages visa applications – if you’re outside the UK). Ministers chose the latter, only relaxing the rules piecemeal in recent days after they came under increasing public and political pressure.
The problem is that the system can not easily be sped up or made friendlier at the push of a button. Institutionally, the Home Office often can’t cope with the demands placed on it. While I was researching an in-depth profile of the department last year, current and former officials described the way scarce resources were shuffled around according to short-term political priorities, with the result that key operations were often starved of the funds required to run them efficiently. Something like that seems to be unfolding in the UK’s asylum system, where the backlog of cases has almost trebled since 2019, despite there being no significant overall rise in claims. Ukrainians are currently experiencing another bottleneck: nearly 19,000 people have applied for visas in the past two weeks, but only a few hundred have been granted so far.
This is not only a question of efficiency. A thread of anti-immigrant hostility and an obsession with control runs through the Home Office, Britain’s “law and order” department, from the upper echelons in Whitehall to frontline staff. As one former official told me last year, there is an intense fear of the “pull factor”: the idea that if you loosen the rules in one place, it will encourage an overwhelming tide of migration. It has been years in the making and is the product of both Conservative and Labour governments, frequently under pressure from a xenophobic rightwing press. You could see these instincts on display last week when, facing unfavourable comparisons with Ireland, which has waived visa requirements for Ukrainians, Home Office sources briefed the Telegraph that Ireland’s open-door policy created a “security risk” for the UK because of the commontravel area that allows relatively free movement between the two countries.
In Patel, the Home Office has found a secretary of state who expresses all the department’s worst tendencies. As one of her former colleagues told me last year, she is a “blunt instrument” who seeks to do and say the thing that will be perceived to be the toughest anyone could possibly do or say in any given scenario. When challenged by her opposite number, Yvette Cooper, in parliament this week, Patel said that stringent identity checks were necessary to prevent another Windrush scandal. What she is unable or unwilling to admit, however, is that such elaborate forms of ID are only necessary because her department’s hostile environment policies deliberately reduce people to destitution if their documents are not in order.
Patel is sometimes accused of incompetence, but in fact she displays some of the leadership skills that would in theory be required to turn the Home Office around: a clarity of purpose, and willingness to expend considerable personal and political capital in forcing through unpopular institutional change. The trouble is that she is leading the department in precisely the direction guaranteed to make the problems even worse. Her nationality and borders bill, which is being pushed through parliament in the face of fierce opposition from refugee and migrants’ rights organisations – as well as some of her own staff – will introduce a punitive system of refugee protection in which people will face harsh punishment if they do not do as they are told. At the same time, the narrowing of routes for economic migration under the post-Brexit “points-based” immigration system further reduces people’s options in times of need.
Patel, though, is the product of a wider political environment. British culture has for years been dominated by a rightwing discourse that presents migration as first and foremost a problem. The Conservative MP Edward Leigh faced widespread criticism when he praised Patel during a debate on 2 March for “not throwing away the immigration rulebook”, since his constituents had already “done our bit in terms of migration from eastern Europe”, but he was expressing an attitude that has dominated this country’s politics for years. Now even the right is up in arms at the failure to do more for Ukrainian refugees. But they should take a long, hard look at the way the system works – because they helped build it. And the Home Office won’t change until this changes too.
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, and Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain’s Far Right
