Britain’s Conservative Party government has loosened rules surrounding Ukrainian visas in order to allow close relatives of British Citizens to more easily come to the UK.
Boris Johnson’s Tory government has loosened visa rules for Ukrainian relatives of British citizens, as many flee the eastern European country which was invaded by Russia last week.
However, for Britain’s leftist Labour party, the loosening is not radical enough, as MPs call on the Prime Minister to take more radical measures.
According to a report by the BBC, Boris Johnson said that — with the loosened measures — the UK would not turn its back on in its “hour of need”.
“We want to be as generous as we possibly can, and certainly we want people who have relatives in Ukraine to be able to bring them over as fast as possible,” the broadcaster reports the PM as saying.
“We want to make sure that we have routes for people fleeing disaster, war, persecution in Ukraine to come here,” Johnson also noted, emphasising that Britain was working with some of Ukraine’s neighbouring countries in order to “to help bring people over”.
The government also announced that another £40 million in aid would be sent to Ukraine for the purchase of medical supplies as well as what Sky News reports as “other help”.
However, the visa loosening — which applies to a British citizen’s spouse, unmarried partner of two years or more, children, as well as a number of of other categories — does not go far enough for Britain’s leftist labour party, with a number calling for a scrapping of visa requirements entirely.
“What are they thinking?” asked Labour Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. “What about people struggling to get elderly parents here, or Ukrainians who can’t come stay with sister or brother here?”
“Shameful of Govt to refuse to even help other relatives in a terrible European war like this,” the Labour MP continued, demanding that the rules must be “immediately” extended to more family members, before setting out an even broader loosening than that in order to “help other Ukrainians too”.
Shadow Secretary of State, David Lammy MP also called for a “sanctuary route” for Ukrainians, saying that there was a “shameful moral vacuum at the heart of government” regarding how they had been treating the crisis.
Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon — who heads up the europhile left-wing Scottish National Party — demanded the UK lift all visa requirements for Ukrainians.
“Restricting to family members too limited & defining ‘family member’ so narrowly compounds this,” Sturgeon wrote online.
“[The UK Home Office] must lift visa requirement for all Ukrainians seeking entry to UK as other countries doing,” She continued. “Anything less is unacceptable.”
Despite the criticisms, higher-ups in government have claimed to be doing everything they can to help Ukrainians fleeing the conflict, and that they are looking at further easing measures to this end.
Ben Wallace, the UK’s Secretary of Defence, emphasised that Britain was doing everything it could to help Ukrainians, and was going to study offers European nations had put on the table before deciding the next steps.