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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"As Russian forces unleash terror on Ukraine, fragile economies in the Middle East – many battered by war – face a new backlash from the Russian president’s adventurism: a push into even deeper food insecurity." | Writes @cheesemanab newstatesman.com/world/2022/03/…
In many Arab economies, bread makes up the majority of calories consumed; its cost is a political issue.
Globally, food prices are at their highest since 2011, when a surge in the cost of living helped trigger the Arab Spring.
"The question often asked about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is: why? The answer lies in geography, history and personality." | Writes Tim Marshall newstatesman.com/world/europe/u…
"According to many Western intellectuals the end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in an era of peace and prosperity... It was a poor reading of history."
"Those who argued that war was an anachronism in 21st-century Europe are having to face the limitations of reasonable engagement with an unreasonable violent power. Underpinning Putin’s rationale for his criminal invasion of Ukraine is an appeal to nationalism."
"British intelligence reportedly warned against the granting of peerage to the Prime Minister's close friend and now Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia" - @AngelaRayner in #PMQs
In the face of Russia’s indiscriminate attack, Ukrainians’ care for their animals is an act of defiance. newstatesman.com/world/europe/u…
Over the past few weeks, many fleeing refugees are using an extra suitcase in order to carry their cat or dog to safety.
Photos of countless refugee cats and dogs being clung to by the newly displaced are now in circulation. In one particularly striking instance, a family took turns to carry their large, elderly German Shepherd the last 17km to the Polish border.
We have long known what oligarchy and kleptocracy meant in theory, but Russia’s savagery is forcing the UK into a national moment of recognition. newstatesman.com/culture/books/…
So how exactly does the UK prop up Putin’s gangster state?
🟥Firstly, Slapps (“strategic lawsuits against public participation”) - intimidatory actions brought against journalists for reporting on the business dealings of Russian oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich and their associated entities.
Scotland's official embrace of literature reveals much about its comfortably stuck political culture, cosily immured from an increasingly illiberal world. newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/…
Nicola Sturgeon loves books. It says so on her Twitter bio, with her picture against a wall of colourful hardbacks.
The virtues of reading are also key to the government Sturgeon leads. There is a First Minister’s reading challenge, a nationwide project to “develop reading cultures” and encourage reading for pleasure.