Ukraine

Sarah Owen Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Geraint Davies]

The right hon. Lady makes an excellent point, which I fully concur with. Frankly, the reason for this discrepancy has been the mean-minded culture in Britain—the idea that we somehow have a refugee problem. Across Europe, we are 17th for the number of asylum seekers we take per head of population, and fifth overall. It is not as if we have a huge burden. In Poland and elsewhere—I have mentioned Lithuania—there is a massive burden of people coming over. A lot of them are in a state of psychological flight, and they think, “Actually, we want to go to Britain.” Getting to Britain is being made out to have been made easy, but it has not. People are taking months, not days, to get here, and that should be resolved straight away.

[Sarah Owen (Luton North) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is deep concern about reports that Ukrainian refugees are becoming homeless after falling out with hosts in this country? There is a problem not only with the matching of Ukrainian refugees and their hosts, but with maintenance. We are not checking that those refugees—they are incredibly vulnerable, and many of them are women—are safe when they get to this country.

[Geraint Davies]

The hon. Lady makes a critical point about the need to follow through on the association with families to ensure that sufficient support is provided, and that those who are received are safe and secure. The Government may need to put their hand deeper into their pocket to ensure that people are given a safe haven, and that these matches are made properly. More resource might be needed in the Home Office to facilitate that. It comes against a backdrop of other members of the Government saying, “We need to slash arbitrarily 90,000 people from the civil service.” This war, alongside other changes, means that more public management will be required for our own security and the safety of the people who come over, and I welcome the point that she makes.

I was saying that we need to co-operate more across Europe. We have the facility, and we have taken leadership in terms of unilateral action and military support. We need to be closer to our European allies who share our fundamental values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, in order to get them to raise their game. Germany has now said that it will provide support, but there is a lot of talk in both France and Germany along the lines of “We had better give Russia a bit of this,” and “Maybe we should just settle and give them a bit, as we did with Crimea.” As has already been pointed out, we do not want allow the creeping, partial success of Putin. It is something that we want to work against, alongside our allies. I am a member of the Council of Europe, which shares those fundamental values. Russia, of course, was a member, but we ensured that it was ejected for a clear breach of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. I should like to see a route map showing that, at some time in the future, Russia will readopt those values and come back into the fold, rather than permanently being driven, along with China, into a partnership that pushes us towards a more totalitarian way of thinking globally.

This is a time of reckoning. There have been debates about how we can integrate economically with people who do not have our interests at heart when it comes to, for instance, supply chains or the Uyghurs, and this is a time to stand back and think about our global strategy. Obviously, we would all like to be able to secure respect for human rights, get the Russians out of Ukraine and have an economic co-existence that made sense, but sadly, we have recently seen the use of gas and grain as instruments of war; and we have seen sanctions used in China as well. We need to think in an integrated way about how to move forward. However, in the very short term, our focus and resolve must be concentrated on supporting Ukraine in delivering the democracy, the sovereignty and the working economy that it naturally craves.