Patrick Christys: What do you think about Britain taking in Ukrainian refugees?

I want to start today by throwing it over to you, the viewer and the listener. I want to ask what you think about Britain taking Ukrainian refugees.

We are witnessing a proper war, there can be no doubt about that. The Ukrainians are putting up a tremendous fight and showing immense resilience and bravery, they are also running an incredibly slick online propaganda machine that makes it look like they might actually be winning.

But when all is said and done; facts are facts and the Russian military is a bohemouth – this is David vs Goliath and one has to assume that, unless both sides sit down at the negotiating table soon and thrash out a deal, eventually, Russia will hoist its flag above Kiev’s government buildings.

That will be a very, very dark day.

So, there will be millions of Ukrainian refugees.

Are we full here in the UK? Have we got room for at least some of them? Do we have a moral duty to throw open our borders? Have we already extended the hand of charity far enough?

What’s happening now does expose serious questions about our asylum system that many of us have been talking about for years.

For a long time now we have been a soft touch. Just take the Channel as an example. We have allowed tens of thousands of undocumented migrants, some have called them illegal migrants, to enter this country. We have hardly deported any of them.

We spend £4.7m-a-day housing Channel migrants and asylum seekers in hotels.

This is comprised of £3.5 million for hotels for 25,000 asylum seekers, largely made up of Channel migrants, and £1.2 million for 12,000 Afghan refugees evacuated from Kabul.

Scaled up, that would amount to £1.7 billion over the year and represents more than four times the 8,000 asylum seekers housed in hotels at the beginning of last year.

It’s a lot of money, it’s also a lot of hotel rooms and why are they in hotels? Well, because, apparently, there isn’t enough social housing.

On top of all that I’m sure we’re all feeling the pinch at the moment -gas bills, electricity, the cost of living in general…many of us feel a lot poorer than we did a couple of years ago – and that’s not going to get any better any time soon.

So, with all that in mind, do you think we should take in Ukrainian refugees.

On paper we, as a nation, have a lot in common with Ukrainians. They are a Christian country and they share a lot of our same values and norms. We have quite a similar culture, as it were.

I think it will be very interesting to see what Germany does – Merkel threw her country’s borders open when there was conflict in the Middle East. Will Germany do the same now there’s conflict in Europe.

So, I’ll finish how I started, by throwing it over to you – do you think we should take Ukrainian refugees? Is Britain full? Do we have a moral duty to? Where do you stand? Because this is a question that’s going to be asked a lot in the coming weeks and months.