Priti Patel’s Home Office is mired in a glue-thick tendency towards inaction
About time, Priti
TRIMMING some of the red tape holding up Ukrainian refugees from reaching sanctuary in the UK was clearly the right thing to do in a humanitarian emergency.
So why did it take Priti Patel’s Home Office so long to make the changes?
Russia’s march into Ukraine was the most heavily telegraphed invasion in history, so ministers can hardly claim to have been caught on the hop by the inevitable civilian exodus.
The relatively minor concessions finally wrung from the Government — allowing online applications for Ukrainians with a passport or ID card who have family members already in the UK — are approved by Britain’s security services, again raising the question of why they were not implemented at the outset.
And while security checks remain vital, the bureaucratic shambles still faced by other Ukrainians — with tales of visa offices shut for holidays, and elderly women and children made to wait outside in the cold — are simply inexcusable.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Home Office — as with the Foreign Office in its lamentable response to the fall of Afghanistan last year — is mired in a glue-thick tendency towards inaction and hamstrung by Whitehall’s indulgence of working-from-home culture.
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These twin afflictions run through the veins of almost everything the Government does.
Time and again, ministers dig their heels in stubbornly while standing in the wrong spot, only to end up being humiliatingly dragged towards common sense by the tide of public opinion.
That’s no substitute for real leadership.
Slowly frozen
YESTERDAY’S sanctions on a further seven Russian oligarchs worth a combined £15billion are another example of a Government unable to escape the impression it is permanently playing catch-up.
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That said, better late than never, and it should be noted the UK is the first Western country to sanction the most prominent of Vladimir Putin’s wealthy pals, Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.
Some may question how effective freezing the assets of wealthy Russian expats can be in damaging Putin.
But British financier Bill Browder, a scourge of Putin’s corrupt business interests for nearly 20 years, points out the tyrant uses some oligarchs to stash his personal wealth, so restrictions on them hobble him too.
Hearteningly, Mr Browder also claims the West’s current sanctions are already “making heads spin in Moscow”.
It is sad to reflect, however, that it took Putin’s bloodthirsty rampage across Ukraine to spur the West into action.
It isn’t as if the oligarchs were shy of flaunting their ill-gotten gains under our noses, often with obscene vulgarity.
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And we were under even fewer illusions as to Putin’s monstrous nature.
We must continue to ramp up both the sanctions and the asset-seizures, and keep our boot on Mad Vlad’s windpipe.