Readers despair at the Tory government’s treatment of the people who risked their lives to work for it in Afghanistan
You have to admire the genius of the UK’s refugee policy: first, no one who gets here unofficially can be considered for asylum and the only way to get here is by official routes – but there are no official routes in (UK to take 20,000 Afghan refugees over five years under resettlement plan, 17 August). And second, with the Afghan crisis, we are told by Whitehall that “we don’t want to do this on the basis of whoever can get themselves to Kabul airport over the course of the next week … that means most people will be coming via third countries”. And there is the genius of the approach: anyone coming via third countries will be told that they should claim asylum in the first one they come to, absolving the need for the UK to take any at all. Catch-22 made real.
And we have to endure boasts about the UK’s long record of welcoming refugees – one MP was heard bleating on BBC Radio 4 last week that Britain leads the world in taking people in. Lord Dubs was quoted in the same report as saying that if Canada can take in 20,000 refugees now, why can’t the UK do better than 20,000 over five years?