Across the country, Britons are preparing to host Ukrainian refugees. newstatesman.com/world/europe/u…
A new scheme called “Homes for Ukraine” was announced on Monday by Michael Gove, the Communities Secretary, whereby individuals, community groups, charities and businesses can put Ukrainians up for six months.
From parishioners in the Cornish village of St Mabyn to anarchist squatters occupying a sanctioned oligarch’s Belgravia mansion in the hope that it could be repurposed to house refugees, a variety of volunteers have mobilised.
In early March Boris Johnson promised that “a couple of hundred thousand” Ukrainian refugees would be resettled in Britain -- up from the equally suspiciously round number of 100,000 quoted by Priti Patel, a day before.
Home Office insiders are sceptical about these figures.
The number was simply calculated by counting the number of Ukrainians in the UK and working out the total if each one brought five people over, @Anoosh_C hears from within the department.
“It’s a guess,” an official tells the NS.
While civil servants privately decry Priti Patel's lack of aptitude, insiders say that she keeps her place at the cabinet table because she plays to the anti-immigration voter base.
“She’s a state-educated Asian woman who appeals to old white men on immigration -- she’s the perfect Tory minister,” as one political spinner once put it to @Anoosh_C.
Patel’s unashamedly hardline stance on migration is even harder in private, according to those in the know.
Little wonder, then, that responsibility for the refugee sponsorship scheme was soon quietly handed over to Michael Gove.
He is known as the go-to minister for cleaning up colleagues' mess, and pushing through sticky policy.
The former MP Richard Harrington, who first entered government in 2015 as minister for Syrian refugees, has been quickly ennobled and appointed minister for refugees and will report to both Gove and Patel’s departments.
Yet this, too, has been a “confusing” change, according to a Home Office official.
Amid all this confusion, the thousands of people who want to host refugees await their instructions. newstatesman.com/world/europe/u…
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