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Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
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Mar 9 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The number of Ukrainians who have fled the country has passed 2 million...

Meanwhile, the UK has extremely grudgingly admitted 760 of them.

Shameful response at odds with the whole of the rest of Europe, without exception.
It's frankly amazing it's even 760. The Devil would blanch at putting together a system as convoluted as the visa application process. And then there's this...
The sad thing is, many people here stand ready to throw open their doors in welcome too.

But the Home Office has erected a wall as high as the Hoover Dam.
Important thing to remember: at the moment, the only UK visa scheme operational is for those who already have family members in the UK.

So we're not even at the level of needing strangers to take refugees in. Just reuniting families.

And yet the process is still taking weeks.

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More from @uk_domain_names

Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
Mar 10
Because the pandemic doesn't make the headlines any more, you may not realise how much the vaccination effort has slowed.

Indeed, it has almost stopped.

In the 30 days to 8 March, it delivered just:

* 244,831 first doses

* 540,513 second doses

* 863,152 booster doses

V bad.
Given that the number of new cases is rising very fast, and that the vaccine is pretty much the only defence the Tories claim to be holding onto, the paltry vaccination rate suggests we may face bigger and bigger problems as population immunity wears off. Image
By this point, we all know the drill.

COVID-19 is like a grim conveyor belt.

First cases rise.
Then hospitalisations rise.
Then deaths rise.

The current large rise in cases will be reflected down the road.
Read 5 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
Mar 9
Polling shows a majority of Tory voters are in favour of a more compassionate approach to Ukrainian refugees.

Please stop saying it's what they voted for. It's not. They voted for a party. That party has 5 years to do whatever it wants, unfettered by voter opinion. Not the same!
Why is it important?

Because if the UK is ever to move on from ruinous Tory rule, it will need to be by persuading Tory voters.

And the road to persuasion must begin by seeking commonalities.

A humanitarian response to the current refugee crisis is an obvious place to start.
Not "this is what you voted for", but "I know this is not what you voted for, so how do you feel about it?"
Read 4 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
Mar 7
Ukrainian refugees MUST fill in an application and book to visit a VAC. (No VACs open in Ukraine.)

Nearest VACs (distance from Kyiv):
Rzeszow, Poland: 700km
Warsaw, Poland: 780km
Budapest, Hungary: 1,116km
Chisinau, Moldova: 470km
Bucharest, Romania: 900km
Paris, France: 2,360km
The Home Office has stated that the maximum capacity across all VACs is 6,000 appointments/week.

There have already been over 13,500 visa applications.

50 visas have been granted.
We are the only country in the world to have a complex visa process in place for Ukrainian refugees.

Other countries have either binned their processes entirely ("just turn up") or slimmed down to the bare essentials.
Read 6 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
Mar 7
A thread about WW3...

WW3, should the world have the gravest misfortune to experience it, will be different from all previous wars.

We can't look back at WW2, and think "like that, but with cellphones".

We will never see phalanxes of thousands of tanks sweeping across Europe.
We will never experience a sky dark with thousands of planes, or hundreds of bombers levelling a single city with conventional weapons.

Why?

Simply this: modern weapons are too complex and too expensive.

Even if you retool the economy for war, you can't pump out mass numbers.
Russia has around 1,500 combat planes, the USA 2,700.

That's the equivalent of 2 weeks of aircraft production in 1944, the busiest time of WW2.

If we consider bombers, Russia has about 120 and the USA 140. Spread those across the European/Asian theatre, and it's insignificant.
Read 8 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
Mar 6
Priti Patel said up to 100,000 Ukrainians could come. Then 200,000.

The reality: "While Poland took in 750,000 refugees last week, by Friday only 500 Ukrainians had applied to join family members here and most were still waiting for their visas."

Shame!
archive.ph/zURdm
Isn't it extraordinary, given the small numbers, that the UK's performance on granting visas has remained so pathetic that the French Interior Minister felt compelled to write to Priti Patel to criticise the UK's "lack of humanity"?
Fundamentally the Home Office are applying the Hostile Environment rules with just a couple of tweaks: the application fee has been removed, and there's some dispensation for missing documents.

But refugees still have to run the gauntlet of application, interview and biometrics.
Read 5 tweets
Edwin Hayward 🦄 🗡 Profile picture
Mar 5
On the official UK government website, there are various news stories, translations of speeches, calls for proposals etc. in Ukrainian.

But since the war started on 24 February, nothing has been published in Ukrainian, not even a translation of the visa concessions guidance. Image
They clearly have the capacity to produce relevant translations, based on their past output.

And even if they don't have in-house capability right now, there are literally thousands of Ukrainians in the UK who would leap at the chance to help.

This can only be deliberate.
You know what else is deliberate?

The hellish choose-your-own-adventure that is the visa application process.

I've broken it all down in the article below. It's a long read, but necessarily so.
medium.com/@edwinhayward/…
Read 4 tweets

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