Ukraine

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Sam Tarry (Ilford South) (Lab)]

The world and all of us across this House have watched in unity the horrors of recent weeks, as Ukrainian civilians and thousands of soldiers have been killed in this predicted and premeditated invasion. For perhaps the only time in the next couple of months, I sat on the Conservative side of the House to watch Zelensky give his powerful speech, as we showed unity, with party differences put aside for that day.

The ongoing war has forced more than 2.5 million people, mainly women and children, to flee their country and face the prospect of many months of uncertainty in refugee camps across Europe. Indeed, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has called it the

“fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II”,

with many predicting that numbers could exceed 4 million people in the months ahead.

While many of our European partners have scrapped their bureaucratic red tape to enable hundreds of thousands of people who are cold, hungry, grieving and desperately in need of support to seek sanctuary in their country, our Government have offered little more than hollow promises until this day. Despite the Prime Minister last week offering hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians sanctuary in the UK, the Government were shamefully forced to admit that only 1,000 people have been admitted and given refuge on our shores. The visa processing centre that the Home Office set up in Calais was little more than a single desk that failed to offer desperate Ukrainians either appointments or walk-in access. Inexplicably, it was not even made public as tens of thousands of Ukrainians streamed across France in search of safe passage.

The reality is that this is the culmination of more than a decade of this Government’s hostile environment policy that, as everyone knows, is nothing more than a dog-whistle, anti-immigrant, racist agenda that prevents some of the most vulnerable people on Earth from seeking sanctuary on our shores, and has perhaps been too successful by far. On top of this, the Government have continued to push their inhumane Nationality and Borders Bill through this House. I believe that the Home Secretary should hang her head in shame and explain why we are the only country in Europe that has failed to offer an accessible route to reunite refugees with their families. By comparison, our partners across Europe have thrown open their borders, slashed red tape and taken countless vulnerable families.

In their hour of need, we can and must do better for millions of Ukrainians. It is completely unacceptable that already exhausted people, who have travelled hundreds of miles, women and children, are being asked to jump through multiple arduous and unrealistic hoops, while they wait nervously for weeks to find out whether they will be admitted. The best our Government appear to be able to offer is a do-it-yourself asylum scheme, where UK householders are asked to name refugees they wish to sponsor, which would suggest we are asking Ukrainian refugees to essentially crowd source their own asylum applications.

That is why we in the Labour party are calling for emergency protection visas for those fleeing Ukraine who wish to reach the UK. This would lift normal visa requirements other than biometrics and security checks, which can be swiftly done en route. That would provide a quick, simple and safe route to sanctuary for all who need it.

It will have escaped no one that, despite so little being done to help Ukrainians as they face the horrors of war, it is still far more support than was offered just months ago to those who were fleeing the brutal horrors of the oncoming Taliban regime in Afghanistan. In my Ilford South office, we still have more than 220 active cases of Afghan refugees, some of which are still receiving boiler-plate responses from the Home Office and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Many are of people trying to flee Afghanistan because they continue to face oppression and threats to their lives; they are often people who worked directly with the UK Government. That is totally unacceptable. The promises we made at the time to take only 20,000 people over the next four years were deplorable, but showed the true face of our immigration and refugee policy.

On the issue of sanctions against Russia, it is clear we must go far further to cut out the rot of dirty Russian money in our political system. Despite repeated warnings over many years, our Government, far from failing to act, have openly embraced the oligarchic wealth that was stolen from the Russian people after the fall of the Soviet Union, and made Britain the destination of choice for kleptocrats, who hide their loot under our noses, not far from the very building we sit in. It should not have taken the invasion of Ukraine for the Government to take action. The moves to sanction individuals and freeze assets are long overdue, after repeated calls by Members on both sides of this House.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

Did my hon. Friend watch the coverage of the occupation of Mr Deripaska’s mansion yesterday? None of us condones that kind of behaviour, but there were more Crown servants there yesterday than there are in the Treasury asset freezing team. Surely, for too long now, we have been soft on oligarchs and soft on the causes of oligarchs, and what we now need are proper sanction powers to go after the properties and to actually seize, not merely freeze, the assets.

[Sam Tarry]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention, and I see the frustration that people have felt that has led them to take direct action to make the point he makes.

That nicely brings me to my next point, which is about how unsurprising it is that the Conservative party has been so reluctant to crack down on these individuals as it would mean biting the hand that feeds it, whether that is our own Prime Minister ignoring the warnings of our security services before ennobling Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a billionaire Russian banker and former KGB officer, or as I said earlier in the debate, accepting £30,000 from the wife of a former crony of Vladimir Putin so they could dine with a former Defence Secretary and be given a private tour of the Churchill war rooms. That is unacceptable. These people walk in the same circles. This is the problem we see today.

Given that the Conservative party is so easily bought, major questions over Russian financial influence need to be addressed. That has potentially jeopardised our national security and corrupted the very politics and democracy that we seek to uphold. If Britain is to be seen at this moment as taking a new approach of compassion—genuine compassion—towards refugees, we should also take this moment to root out that dark money and truly defend democracy by cleaning up our politics, so that we can look Mr Putin and the people in the Kremlin in the eye with democracy in our hearts and defiance against totalitarianism in our eyes.