Israel-Gaza: again

First, the horror. Men, women and children, overwhelmingly civilians, who have been living their lives as best they can, now slaughtered, kidnapped, brutalised.

 

Second, the anger. Fury at the cruelty, the futility, of yet more killing, more destruction. 

 

Third, the despair. How much longer must this continue? Is there no one who can stop it?

 

You can have boundless sympathy, as I do, for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have lived in fear for decades, unable to enjoy anything resembling a normal life, unable ever to hope for a better future for their children.

 

You can believe, as I do, that successive Israeli governments have behaved with a reckless sense of overweening superiority towards the Palestinian people, convinced that their military prowess will protect them against any imaginable threat.

 

And you can struggle, as I did on 9/11, to suppress the unworthy, unspoken, nagging voice in your head. ‘What did they expect?’

 

So it’s important to be clear about where we must plant our flag as we confront the new war between Israel and Hamas. No amount of injustice, no history of oppression, can ever justify the indiscriminate killing of civilians. It was true when the Provisional IRA were blowing up pubs in Birmingham and Guildford, or a Remembrance Day event in Enniskillen; when Kurdish extremists or the Islamic State group were murdering dozens of civilians in Istanbul; and every time the Taliban or a Taliban-affiliated group blows up civilians in Pakistan.

 

And here is something else that is equally true. Israel’s siege of Gaza (aided and abetted by Egypt) has been unconscionable, utterly inhumane and contrary to international law. It has turned a tiny sliver of land bordering the Mediterranean into, as the cliché has it, an open-air prison. And we all know what happens when the pressure inside a pressure cooker becomes unsustainable.

 

The never-ending seizure and occupation of Palestinian land on the West Bank as Israeli settlements have expanded has been the final nail in the coffin of any hopes of a so-called ‘two-state’ solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The arrogance and – yes, let’s call it what it is – quasi-fascism displayed by some of the current Israeli government’s most extremist ministers has added yet more fuel to the fires of resentment that have burned for so long among the Palestinians.

 

And as if all that wasn’t enough, let’s not forget those unlovely regional super-powers Iran and Saudi Arabia, each with its own interests in the region and each perfectly prepared to countenance extreme brutality to further its aims.

 

Iran backs both Hamas and Hizbollah, which is a constant threat to Israel from across its northern border in Lebanon. Regional analysts are agreed that an operation on the scale of that which was launched by Hamas on Saturday morning could never have been undertaken without a green light from Tehran.

 

Why? Perhaps because Iran is desperate to prevent Israel and Saudi Arabia stitching up a deal, encouraged by the US, which would further isolate Iran and further strengthen Israel.

 

After the failure of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s, Israel decided it would have to learn to live with a restive Palestinian population on its doorstep and under its control. It came to believe, idiotically, that an endless low-intensity conflict, kept at arm’s length from most of Israel’s population by draconian and humiliating security measures, wouldn’t be so bad. Outsiders who warned them that this was a strategy of the utmost foolishness were dismissed out of hand. ‘You don’t understand the Palestinians like we do. The only language they understand is force.’

 

So now the low-intensity conflict has become a high-intensity conflict. Don’t believe anyone who says this escalation came out of the blue. Everyone – with the exception of Israel’s myopic government – knew that sooner or later, the steady increase in Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank would produce a reaction. They just didn’t know where or when.

 

Two wrongs never make a right. Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people is unjustifiable. So is the Hamas response. And if there are any Hamas leaders with a sense of history, perhaps they should reflect on this: thirty years of political violence by the Provisional IRA did not end with a united Ireland. Decades of Kurdish political violence has not ended with an independent Kurdish state. The brutality of the Islamic State group in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere has not brought about an Islamic State.

 

But perhaps that’s not what matters most to Hamas’s leaders. Perhaps what matters most is ensuring that the world does not write off the Palestinian tragedy. The message from Gaza, perhaps, is as simple as that: ‘We are here. We exist. We have rights.’

 

So what can they hope to achieve, at the cost of hundreds of lives lost, both Palestinian and Israeli? 

 

Message received.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Is Ukraine destined to become a frozen conflict?

 If I were a Ukrainian, I would be reading everything I could find on the history of frozen conflicts. 

Korea. Cyprus. China-Taiwan. Israel-Palestine. Western Sahara. Wars which ended without ending, which remain frozen in time. Conflicts unresolved, deaths unavenged, borders undrawn. 

Fifteen months after President Putin unleashed an invasion that was meant to last no more than a few days, it is not unreasonable to start asking how – and when – this brutal war will end. Which is where frozen conflicts come in, because not all wars end in victory or defeat.

North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. The North had clear military superiority and was confident of an easy victory. Three years later, and after the deaths of an estimated three million people, an armistice was signed. It had taken two years to negotiate and did not include a peace treaty. In theory, seventy years later, the two Koreas are still at war.

Turkey invaded Cyprus on 20 July 1974, claiming that it had to act in order to protect Turkish Cypriots and prevent the absorption of Cyprus by Greece. Nearly fifty years later, it still occupies about one-third of the island.

China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since the end of the Second World War. More than seven decades later, it still insists that it retains the right to use force to reunify the two Chinas.

Israel declared its establishment as a Jewish state in 1948. Its Arab neighbours declared war, and 75 years later, only two of them, Egypt and Jordan, have signed peace treaties. Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria remain closed, and the legal status of Jerusalem and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights remains unresolved.

Western Sahara has been largely occupied by Morocco since Spain relinquished control in 1975. A ceasefire between Moroccan forces and the pro-independence Polisario movement has been in place since 1991, monitored by a UN peacekeeping force. No peace agreement has been signed, and the US is the only country that recognises Moroccan sovereignty over the territory.

So is this how the war in Ukraine will end? With neither side having won or lost, with Russian forces still occupying swathes of the east of the country as well as Crimea? Not just for the next few months or years, but for decades?

No one can confidently predict that this is what the future holds for Ukraine. But nor can anyone deny that it is a possibility, perhaps even a strong possibility. After all, Russia knows better than most how to exploit smouldering conflicts that serve its purposes.

Conflicts like those in Transnistria, the pro-Moscow breakaway province of Moldova, or South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Moscow-controlled territories in Georgia.

Would Putin be prepared to accept a frozen conflict in Ukraine? It might serve his purposes well. He would not have to give up his claim that Ukraine is historically part of Greater Russia, and he would retain his all-important access to the Black Sea.

But most important of all, he would hugely complicate Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO and the EU, because neither group is keen to accept as new members countries that are partly under military occupation. (In 2004, the EU made an exception for Cyprus, but it’s an exception that is unlikely to be repeated.) 

For the Ukrainians, of course, the arguments are very different. But one day, perhaps sooner than we think, Kyiv’s Western allies will start asking with greater insistence: how do you see this ending? For how much longer will we have to spend billions of dollars on military assistance to ensure that you are not defeated?

With a US presidential election campaign already looming on the horizon, it’s a question that is bound to be asked ever more insistently. And the Ukrainians know that without US assistance, they will soon be in serious trouble.

So will they, one day, decide that an armistice is the least worst option? Not a negotiated peace, but a negotiated end to military conflict. In all the conflicts I have mentioned, there have been periodic spluttering attempts to move away from no-war to something more permanent. None has worked out.

For now, the view of Ukraine’s Western allies is that it is in our interests as well as Ukraine’s that the reckless Russian military adventure is seen to fail. But that cost-benefit analysis is not immutable.

I’m sure the Ukrainians know that as well as anyone. And I’m equally sure that they have already started reading up on frozen conflicts.

 

 

Where we are now

 

The Conservative party has a death wish. It’s the only credible explanation.

Its MPs no longer know what they want, what they believe, or what they’re for. They just want it to stop. All of it. Now. Please.

Look at what they have been through. 

The supreme folly of the Brexit referendum, foisted on them by David Cameron, a dilettante prime minister who had neither the skill, the courage nor the strength to see off his party’s ultras. 

The ramshackle chaos of the May administration, blown onto the rocks by those same ultras who thought the moment had finally come for their Reaganite, free-market ideology.

The shameful immorality of Boris Johnson, who broke the law, broke the rules and told so many lies that even his own MPs could take no more of him.

Let’s be merciful and cast a veil over what came next. 

And now, yet again, Tory MPs have to make a decision. Do they continue their slide into political oblivion, reaching such depths of electoral unpopularity that the pollsters are left gasping for air?

Or do they, somehow, step back from the brink and start the long, painful process of reinventing themselves as a serious political force?

It has come to something when a former Russian president greets the resignation of a British prime minister by sending his congratulations to the lettuce which had come to symbolise the utter humiliation of the UK government. (Dmitri Medvedev tweeted on Thursday: ‘Bye bye, Liz Truss, congrats to lettuce.’)

Four prime ministers in six years. Each one a Tory, and each one worse than the one they replaced. They have done immense damage to the UK economy, to its political structures and to the very fabric of British democracy. And now, it seems, many Tory MPs seriously believe that the answer to their problems – the best way to confront the existential threat to their party – is to turn the clock back and reinstate the pound-shop wannabe Churchill whom they kicked out less than six months ago. 

The definition of insanity, as Einstein never said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. 

The Conservative party used to be the epitome of un-ideology. Remember the old joke? ‘I’m not political at all, I just vote Conservative.’ Now, unless they reverse course, they are about to be dragged over the cliff edge by the very people who have inflicted so much damage both on their party and on the country.

Boris Johnson is no ideologue. But he is perfectly happy to indulge the ideologues if they help him further his own interests. 

Nor is Rishi Sunak a cuddly social democrat. But neither, as we saw from his response to the Covid pandemic, is he blinded by ideology. 

After the European parliament elections in May 2019, when the Brexit party won thirty per cent of the vote and the Tories slumped to fourth place, behind Labour and the Lib Dems, with less than ten per cent of votes cast, I suggested that it might be time for a realignment of the British political party system. 

Let’s have four main parties, I suggested: English Nationalists, Conservative Democrats, Social Democrats, and Socialists. ‘It is possible,’ I wrote, ‘that we are observing the beginning of the end of the Conservative party as we know it.’

The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland argues that the Liz Truss experiment marks the end of what he calls Brexitism, ‘the view that reality, including the laws of economic gravity, can be wished away, so long as you screw your eyes tight shut and believe.’

On the other hand, perhaps Brexitism still has some life left in it, and we really are closer now to the end of the end of the Conservative party than we were three short years ago. We’ll know by the end of next week at the latest.

Why all those people in The Queue are, er, a bit odd

For the past week, I have been out of London, away from home. Far from the madding crowds – and, of course, far from The Queue.

I have been with people who were getting on with their daily lives: shop-keepers, restaurant-owners, dog-walkers and holiday-makers.  (Thérèse Coffey, please note: no Oxford comma.)

It has all been wonderfully, refreshingly, normal. It has been, you might say, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

True, I have spotted a few – very few, to be honest – Union flags flying at half mast. And the local bakers have put a sign in their window saying that ‘after much deliberation’, they have decided not to open on Monday.

In the evenings, I have been watching the TV news. News from afar, from a different country. A country where countless journalists and broadcast executives have at last seen all their years – decades – of preparation pay off. Who can blame them for wanting to make the most of it?

TV cameras love crowds. They love spectacle, especially spectacle for which they can plan so meticulously so far in advance. Uniforms, bands, men in fancy dress wearing Gilbert & Sullivan medals. It’s all totally irresistible.

But I don’t mean to sneer. The death of a monarch, especially the death of the only monarch most of us have ever known, is of course an event of major national importance. It is perfectly right and proper that the event itself, its implications, the ceremonial that accompanies it, should all be reported on and analysed.

Yet something has been not quite right. I have been barely 130 miles from London, on the north Norfolk coast – not on Mars, or in the furthest reaches of the Scottish Highlands. But it has felt as if the Britain I have been seeing on the TV each evening has not been the same Britain in which I have been enjoying walks along the beach or delicious pub lunches.

I fully acknowledge that for many people – probably millions of people – the death of the Queen has been an event of deep sorrow. I also acknowledge that it is a moment of real significance in the history of our realm.

But how do we best reflect the true state of a nation in which there are so many different reactions to the same event? It is an unfortunate fact of life that journalists always tend to ignore the mundane, the ordinary – what’s news-worthy about the thousands of planes that don’t crash? The hundreds of MPs who go about their business unsung, uncorrupt? The thousands of NHS patients who, despite everything, get treated promptly and efficiently by caring health workers?

By definition, what we see on the news is the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary. The people queuing up for countless hours to file past the Queen’s catafalque in Westminster Hall are not ‘ordinary Britons’. They are the opposite. They are – and I hope they won’t mind me saying so – a bit odd.

I use the word odd to mean unusual, not to imply that there is anything suspect or untoward about all those men, women and children, young and old, who have been shuffling patiently along the banks of the Thames to the Palace of Westminster. Each will have had their own reasons for being there: a genuine affection for the late Queen; fond memories of a dead grandmother of whom she reminded them; a simple wish to ‘be there’, to create a memory that can be shared with future generations.

But they do not represent an entire nation. They are not typical, they do not symbolise a ‘nation united in grief’, or whatever is today’s cliché du jour.

Somehow, and I don’t know how, we reporters need to reflect that reality without appearing to mock or belittle. 

I reported for the BBC during that crazy week in September twenty-five years ago when the people of Britain seemed to have lost their heads following the death of Princess Diana. Yes, some of them did go completely bonkers – but most did not.

I think we failed to realise it at the time, or to reflect it – and I fear we’re making the same mistake again. 

Another 'nasty piece of work' in Downing Street?

 It now seems all but certain that the Conservative party are about to elect another unprincipled opportunist as their leader and our prime minister.

Once a Lib Dem, now a Tory. Once a Remainer, now an arch-Brexiteer. A woman who wears flip-flops in her head, not on her feet. And as if all that isn’t bad enough, an out-and-out admirer – or so she says – of the King of Unprincipled Opportunists himself, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson himself.

He was, she says, an ‘excellent prime minister.’ He did ‘a fantastic job.’ Which tells us everything we need to know about the soundness of her judgement. She has positioned herself so far from the political mainstream that if the earth were flat, she’d be clinging onto the edge by her fingertips. (Come to think of it, if there were enough flat-earthers in the Tory party to win her the leadership, she’d emerge overnight as a flat-earther herself.)

You have to admire, though, her novel approach to winning the support of voters as they face the worst cost of living crisis in living memory. Call them bone idle shirkers, afraid of doing a decent day’s work. Accuse them of having the wrong attitude, especially if they have the misfortune to live outside London. Even Norman ‘Get on yer bike’ Tebbit didn’t go that far.

I bet it goes down a treat in the so-called Red Wall seats, where all those traditional Labour voters turned to the Tories in 2019 because they suddenly realised that Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al were horny-handed sons of toil who chanted ‘Up The Workers’ in their sleep.

Just as they cheered her to the rafters when she came up with the truly genius idea that teachers, nurses and police officers outside London should be paid less than their counterparts in the capital. So unbridled was their enthusiasm that she abandoned the policy within 24 hours. Truly, a woman of conviction.

I can see the election billboards now: ‘We’re a nation full of lazy buggers who don’t deserve what they’re paid. Vote Conservative.’

Thank goodness the man whom she admires so much knows the meaning of hard work and is still grafting away at his desk in Downing Street. Who could possibly believe the fake news that he’s jetted off on his second overseas holiday this month, even as the removal vans are pictured outside Number 10?

What do you mean you’ve seen photos of him shopping in a Greek supermarket? Don’t you know it was the media that forced him to quit? Surely you don’t buy all that stuff about dysfunctional government, rebellious ministers and ungrateful backbenchers? 

What is it about Conservative party members that so attracts them to obvious wrong ’uns? Are they all piling into bitcoins and non-fungible tokens, convinced that they have stumbled on the best sure-fire winner since Tulip Mania swept the Netherlands in the 17^th century, when a single bulb was valued at 10,000 times the price of an average house? (Mind you, if NFTs are good enough for Mike Tyson, who am I to quibble?)

Liz Truss prides herself on her plain speaking. She is, she says, a proud Yorkshire woman, it apparently having slipped her mind that she was born in Oxford and went to primary school in Scotland before moving to Leeds and then to Canada. (She now represents a constituency in Norfolk, which last time I looked, isn’t in Yorkshire either.) 

She has learned well at the feet of her mentor. Not Margaret Thatcher, as she would have had us believe when she posed on board that British tank in Estonia. It is Boris Johnson, who developed the art of political shape-shifting so successfully, who has taught her everything she needed to know.

Always tell the punters what they want to hear. Insist that two plus two equal five if it seems politically expedient. Tomorrow, when you are forced to admit that they don’t, claim that it’s only because you always got the big decisions right and delivered on your promises. 

Back in 2013, my former BBC colleague Eddie Mair called Boris Johnson, to his face, ‘a nasty piece of work’. On all the available evidence, Liz Truss is another one.

Sorry, not sorry

 Look. He said he was sorry, didn’t he? He didn’t mean it, of course, but at least he said it. What more do you want?

He said he took full responsibility. He didn’t mean that either, but hey, what else could he say?

In fact, there’s a simple rule to follow whenever he opens his mouth. If the sentence begins with the first person pronoun, insert the word ‘not’ before the verb that follows to work out what he actually means.

‘I will [not] learn lessons from what has happened.’

‘I do [not] fully understand people’s anger.’

‘I have [not] been as surprised and disappointed as everyone else at what has been revealed.’

What the hell did you expect? This is a man, don’t forget, about whom one of his school teachers once wrote: ‘[He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else.’

He is now nearly 58 years old. Do you really think he’s going to change the habits of a lifetime? A man on his third marriage, who has fathered an indeterminate number of children, who has never bothered to buy a suit that actually fits him, and who lies as frequently as he ruffles his hair.

He insists that he has always said what he believes to be true. Translation: he has always said what he wants us to believe to be true, but not much caring whether we believe him or not. He has been sacked twice for lying, he has a total lack of interest in what most people would regard as basic standards of human decency, yet … Well, you know the rest, don’t you?

Napoleon is sometimes quoted – or more likely misquoted – as having said that he would rather have a general who was lucky than one who was good. Our man has an unshakeable faith in his own luck, his luck without end, and he has good reason to. Misdeeds that would have sunk virtually anyone else in public life have left him seemingly untouched, the greased piglet who has slipped through everyone’s hands time and time again.

He can preside over serial law-breaking, day after day, week after week, disgraceful carryings-on under his own nose, yet claim to have had no idea how the ill-disciplined youngsters in his charge were misbehaving after lights out. Yes, from time to time, he would pop his head round the door of the dorms as the kids were having their cocoa but he was shocked – shocked, I tell you -- to discover what mischief they got up to while he was translating ancient Greek texts upstairs.

He thought he was running a monastic order. How was he to know it was really St Trinians?

He is what he has always been, and he will do what he has always done. Anything and everything that he needs to do or say to get through tomorrow. It’s worked perfectly for him up till now – so why shouldn’t it go on working?

At first, as you may recall, his story was that nothing had happened. Then it morphed into, well, some of it might have happened, but there was nothing wrong with it. Now, we’ve got to yes, it was awful, but I wasn’t there at the time.

Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.
His powers of levitation would make a fakir stare,
And when you reach the scene of crime—Macavity’s not there!

Ah. I’ve just realised. I haven’t made clear who this is about. But of course, I didn’t need to, because you’ve known all along, haven’t you? 

'If you were me, what would you do?'

Dear Mr Johnson

I am a 19-year-old medical student from Sudan. I have just been released from jail, where I spent six months being severely tortured. My passport has been confiscated and I have been warned that because of my political activities as a critic of the current military dictatorship in my country, my life is at risk.

My father was murdered by members of a pro-government militia group ten years ago. But my uncle is a successful cardiologist who has been living and working in London for many years, and he has offered to sponsor me and support me if I seek asylum in the UK.

As I no longer have a passport – and as I have no means of obtaining a replacement – the only way I can leave Sudan is by paying smugglers to help me get out illegally. My uncle says he will pay whatever the smugglers charge to bring me to the UK, but I know that the final stage of the journey will be in a rubber boat across the English Channel.

I also know that the UK does not accept asylum applications made from outside the UK, and I have read that you now intend to deport asylum seekers who arrive in the UK via ‘unofficial’ routes to Rwanda.

I have no wish to live in Rwanda, so my question to you is this: if you were me, what would you do? As far as I can see, your government has provided no ‘safe and legal way’ for me to apply for asylum in the UK. 

In other words, you have made it totally impossible for me – and for thousands like me – to seek sanctuary in your country. I can only conclude that even though the UK is a founding signatory to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, this has been your deliberate intention all along.

But here’s the thing: I’m still going to try. I shall just have to hope that the smugglers will find some way to get me into the UK without anyone noticing. I’ll stay with my uncle, out of sight, and hope that somehow I’ll be able to make a new life for myself. Despair does that to people: it convinces us that anything is better than giving up hope.

So please, Mr Johnson, think again. Your plan won’t work, it won’t keep us out. It probably means I’ll never be a doctor, though. 

Which is a shame, both for you and for me.

(Author’s note: this is an imagined case study based on current UK government policy as I understand it.)

Refugees' Tales

The following article appears in the latest newsletter of the human rights organisation Waging Peace, which campaigns on behalf of Sudanese asylum-seekers and refugees. To find out more about their work, click here.

Imagine an 18-year-old girl, living alone with her mother, desperate to flee to safety to escape a genocidal regime.

She and her mother both apply for asylum in the UK. The 18-year-old is lucky: a relative in London offers to sponsor her, but her mother, aged 42, is ruled to be too old to be allowed in. 

The teenage girl was my mother, who fled from Nazi Germany in July 1939. I have her German passport in front of me as I write. It was issued by the Nazis with a large red J for Jew on the first page. Inside is a stamp that reads ‘Leave to land granted at Southampton this day on condition that the holder registers at once with the police and does not enter any employment other than as a resident in service in a private household.’

Her mother had to stay behind in Germany. War broke out five weeks later, and in 1942, she was deported to Lithuania and murdered. I thought of her when I heard Michael Gove boast in the House of Commons the other day that ‘our country has a long and proud history of supporting the most vulnerable during their darkest hour.’

Here’s another story: this time, the refugee is a 20-year-old man who arrives in England on his own from Berlin, having left his parents behind. With the help of a relative, he finds a family of academics in Cambridge who take him in and arrange a job for him as a builder’s labourer. Fourteen months later he is arrested and interned on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien.’ 

After just six weeks, he is released and allowed to enlist in the British army. He ends up working in a top-secret military intelligence unit, which is where he meets his wife-to-be.

That man was my father, and in 1989, fifty years after he and my mother arrived in England, they threw a huge ‘thank you’ party for all their friends. They never forgot that they owed their lives to Britain – but nor did they forget the thousands of others who never made it. (Footnote: my father’s parents managed to get out of Germany in 1940, and spent the war years in Portugal.)

Now fast forward to 2003, when a 42-year-old man – the same age as my German Jewish grandmother – fled from his homeland after being captured and tortured by another genocidal regime. He made it to the UK, where, like my parents, he made a life for himself and eventually became a British citizen. His wife and two sons, who had stayed behind, were all murdered, and in January last year, on a return visit to his home country, he was shot dead during an armed attack by a pro-government militia.

His name was Sharif Barko and he came from the Darfur region of western Sudan. (You may remember that at one time the Darfur genocide was a big news story, but by the time Sharif died, it had been all but forgotten.) 

And in case you’re wondering what’s happening in Sudan now, there are still more than two million people displaced by the Darfur war; the UN has just warned that up to 18 million people could be facing extreme hunger within months, and there’s been an upsurge in violence since the military coup last October. 

Today, an alleged former commander of the notorious Janjaweed militia is due to go on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, facing 31 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman is accused of being implicated in the murders of more than 300 people.

But now, of course, it’s Ukraine that is in the headlines. More than four million – four million! – refugees have fled the country since Russia invaded in February: two million of them are in Poland; 640,000 in Romania; 370,000 in Moldova, the poorest country in Europe; 270,000 in the Czech Republic; and 240,000 in Germany.

Like my parents, and like Sharif Barko, they all fled in fear of their lives. They sought sanctuary wherever they could find it – and to their immense credit, the 27 members of the European Union threw open their doors and offered unrestricted access to all of them, including residence and work permits, housing, health care and education.

Not the UK, though. By the end of last month, the UK had issued a desultory 25,000 visas. The government’s record is utterly shameful, and it stands in sharp contrast to the outpouring of support from the British people: nearly 200,000 offers of accommodation and more than £260 million raised for the Disasters Emergency Committee Ukraine appeal.

Instead of welcoming refugees, which Michael Gove would have us believe is our ‘long and proud history’, the government is now proposing to make it all but impossible for them to get here. Under the terms of its controversial Nationality and Borders Bill (aka the Anti-Refugee Bill), many of those fleeing from war or persecution would be sent to off-shore camps to wait for their asylum applications to be processed, or even stripped of their right to seek asylum if they are deemed to have arrived in the UK by ‘irregular’ means.

So why one rule for Ukrainians and another for everyone else? Take a bow, Sir Bill Wiggin, the old Etonian Tory MP for North Herefordshire. ‘We want Ukrainians and we want Qataris, but we don’t want people in rubber boats,’ he said last week. No one from Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan in other words. No one from Eritrea or Syria.

And no one, of course, from Sudan. No one like Sharif Barko. No one – how can I put it? – who doesn’t have white skin.  Or a few million dollars in the bank.