Slovak authorities said in the 24 hours until 06:00 GMT on Saturday, some 10,000 people entered the country at their three crossings with Ukraine.

This is almost ten times the normal figure. More than 43,000 Ukrainians have fled to Romania in the three days since Russia invaded, while more than 150,000 people have entered Poland.

The only thing you can assume from Tory govt’s delay/refusal to waive visa restrictions for Ukrainians is that they don’t think there’s any electoral advantage in being decent and generous and humane.
What the hell does that say about them and those who vote for them?

— sarah murphy (@13sarahmurphy) February 26, 2022

I agree with Sarah that we should let UKranians in on refugee visas, I don’t agree that we should be weaponising the Tories hapless incompetence against them.

Public perception of immigration criteria

They are the party of keeping people out and we need to do better at selling them the value of being good global citizens.

The Scots certainly seen to have got the message. 

The Scottish government said it would play its part if a resettlement programme to bring Ukraine nationals to the UK is launched.

So here is why I see UKranian visas as good for Britain as a whole.

1. Ukrainian refugees that want to live in the UK are likely to be an economic asset to this country. We are currently short on skilful and enterprising people which is why we have such high numbers of job vacancies.
2. We are a moral country and while we may not call ourselves Christian as we did, we have welcomed many waves of immigrants, because of our humanitarian and religious belief – we want to alleviate suffering.
3. We relish diversity, we have a great friendship with the Polish nation and (were it not for its leaders) the Russian people, we have relatively few Ukranians in this country, but the ones who have appeared in the media over the past week , suggest that we could do with more!
4. If we don’t say yes, others will. We should make the UK the destination  of choice for a refugee Ukranian family (just as we should for other oppressed nations in Africa , Asia and the Far East.
5. When this war resolves itself, the UK will be measured not by the arms we sold into Ukraine but the people we took out.

So we should be asking our Government to send out as many troops as we can , not just to the UK embassies in Poland, Moldova and Hungary but to the safer cities in Ukraine (such as Lviv – on its western borders).

We should put on hold the Nationality and Borders Bill which would make refugees including Ukrainians ‘illegal’

It’s good that our Government has already dropped the family visa fee and made a few other quick concessions, but this is only the start.

Our Prime Minister is making the right noises

We need to be putting as much effort into sorting this refugee crisis as we are putting into financial and economic sanctions.