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Jewish News 10 March 2022
PUTIN’S WAR ON UKRAINE
‘Pathetic’
Dame Margaret Hodge, whose parents were Jewish refugees, tells Lee Harpin the UK must be ‘more generous’ to Ukrainians Dame Margaret Hodge has recalled the ‘battle’ to allow Jews escaping from the German Nazis to enter this country as she called for the government to be far more generous in granting visas to refugees now escaping war-raged Ukraine. Speaking to Jewish News, the Labour MP described it as “pathetic” that by Tuesday only 300 visas had been granted to Ukrainians attempting to escape Russian bombardment. Hodge, the Jewish Labour Movement’s parliamentary chair who was born to Jewish refugee parents, said: “Women, kids, older people clambering over rivers and trying to escape the bombing – I think you have got to put an arm out and welcome them. “So often with this government, it is saying it is going to do something, and then it doesn’t do it in practice. We are up from 50 visas granted to 300, but with the number of Ukraininans saying
they want to come here, it is still pathetic.” The 78-year-old parliamentarian admitted that she could not help but recall the situation in the 1930s, as Jews attempted to escape persecution from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime with the same reluctance of the British government to “be generous now”. She said: “We always do too little too late. To be honest, when the Jews were escaping from Germany we didn’t open our arms. Before 1939, it wasn’t easy to get in. Even with the Kindertransport, it was a battle to let those kids in. We need to be more generous now.” Hodge, who says she will always think of herself as an “immigrant”, is quick to clarify that her own parents, who had left Germany in the 1930s to move to Egypt, and had again left fearing persecution in Cairo in 1948 after the creation of the state of Israel, were not escaping actual war as the Ukrainian refugees are now.
But she adds: “If we hadn’t come here what would have happened? We were turned down by America, Australia and Canada. The Brits were the first to eventually say yes to us. I still remember how proud my late father was when he received an MBE in 1978. That was a symbol to him that at last we were accepted into this country. “We should do much more to help with the situation now. We are big enough, we are wealthy enough – we should be generous enough to understand.” Hodge dismissed as “paranoia” the fears that the UK could become overwhelmed with those wishing to settle here from Ukraine. She said this would not materialise “partly, I think, because we have now got a reputation for being a hostile environment for immigrants”. But she added that most Ukranians would want to be where “friends and relatives are going to be” and would “want to be close to their country to go back if it ever becomes safe enough to return”. The MP said the Home Office should now set out to be “as generous as we can be” and recognise that any Ukrainian leaving the country “at this point is escaping violence and conflict in their lives”. She added: “There should not be a question mark around that, once you have obviously established someone’s identity.” But Hodge refused to join those who have been attacking home secretary Priti Patel over the slow process for letting in refugees. “Having talked to her yesterday, I think she is really trying,” she said. “I just don’t think she can deliver it.”
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Margaret Hodge is urging the government to give more visas to Ukrainians
WE ALWAYS DO TOO LITTLE TOO LATE. WHY ARE WE BEHIND ALL THE TIME?
A visibly fearful mother with her two young children awaits an evacuation train in the city of Zaporizhzhia, south-eastern Ukraine
The outspoken MP said that “after over a decade of cuts, they have really hollowed up the ability of the civil service to do anything”. She continued: “They have destroyed the machinery of government they need to deliver policies. That goes for the Home Office, immigration authorities, the people who are sanctioning Russians. Why are we behind all of the time?” Hodge also told how she was “appalled” that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had repeatedly resorted to claims that he was attempting a “de-Nazification” of Ukraine with his war and that he had attempted to suggest Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky , who is Jewish, was at the helm of a “Nazi” army. “It’s cynical and sickening,” she said. “He is exploiting what must always be seen as one of the biggest human tragedies in the history of the world. Putin is exploiting that to justify a terrible war.” Hodge, who heads the crossparty MPs group against corruption, has long called for the UK government to address the scourge of economic crime, and had warned in the Commons that the country was now “the jurisdiction of choice for a lot of dirty money”. Back in 2018, writing for The Guardian, she called for a “ clamp
down on Russian use of Britain as a safe haven for illegal wealth”. She added: “Britain has become the jurisdiction of choice for kleptocrats, crooks and money launderers – including Russians – because of our weak regulatory framework, shrouded in secrecy and very lightly policed.” In the Commons last month, she greeted prime minister Boris Johnson’s announcement of sanctions against those oligarchs residing in this country with links to Putin’s regime by telling MPs the new sanctions regime against Russia is flawed. She reasoned: “Too many of the kleptocrats that have stolen from the Russian people and support Putin will escape the net.” She now describes the government’s Economic Crime Bill, designed to tackle “dirty money” hidden in the UK after calls to clamp down on Russian oligarchs amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, as “still not fit for purpose”. On Monday evening MPs voted down by a majority of 74 a cross-party amendment proposed by Hodge, which would have required the minister to publish a report on the funding of enforcement agencies in connection with the reforms to “unexplained wealth orders”.
