This article was originally published in March 2022. I republish it five months later, in tandem with mainstream reports that the "Homes for Ukraine" scheme has spiralled into unmitigated disaster, with Ukrainians left "homeless and abandoned" and hosts feeling "used and unappreciated". It seems, sadly, that my article aged well...

I have just discovered that, as the country is brought to its knees through soaring costs of living, the UK Government is oh-so benevolently offering households a "lifeline" in the shape of £350 a month... to house a Ukrainian.

So, a Western British triple-jabbed liberal housing a total stranger who is:

*From a right-wing, nationalist country with Neo-Nazi sympathies

*Almost certainly unvaccinated and generally opposes vaccines

*Very unlikely to speak English (only 18% of Ukrainians do)

What could possibly go wrong?!

It seems that we have seamlessly made the transition from living in the middle of a plague movie, to inhabiting the narrative of a Nick Hornby novel. Housing total strangers to show how "good" you are is the literal plot of the 2001 Nick Hornby book, "How To Be Good".

In this book, the righteous virtue-signalling middle-classes (whom nobody depicts with more excruciating accuracy than Hornby) challenge each other to prove what morally upstanding beacons of superiority they are by letting complete strangers from troubled backgrounds come and live in their spare rooms.

Inevitably - and as would be obvious to anybody with the merest modicum, the slightest sliver, of common sense - this quickly spirals into disaster.

I can't believe we have as a country collapsed into such mass lunacy that now - what was once a fanciful plot of a fictional novel lampooning the puffed-up self-righteousness of the chattering classes - has become reality. That people, including and especially the actual government, are giving serious consideration - and incentives - to such a bizarre, reckless, and irresponsible scheme. To live with a traumatised foreign stranger who can't speak English would require years of specialist training and multi-level support to have any hope of being functional (to say nothing of safe) as an arrangement. To dump such people with random, unskilled members of the public - members of the public who are themselves traumatised after two years of living under draconian coronavirus restrictions and all that these have entailed (including many premature "sudden deaths") - is abhorrent. A lunatic, dangerous aberration, that, frankly, can only be described as the Government taking the p*ss.

If you've ever lived in shared housing, as I have on several occasions, then you'll know how imperative it is to get the right coresidents, and what a complete nightmare life becomes if you don't. What checks and balances do the voluble of virtue intend to conduct to make sure this random foreign stranger they will invite to live with them will be able to fit in with their family life, and won't in fact make their lives a living hell? Before considering living with a total stranger, I would strongly recommend checking out the documentary, 'Worst Roommate Ever', for some insight in to what can happen if you invite strangers to live in your private home. And once they're in, they're very, very difficult to get out.

I'm not suggesting Ukrainians are likely to be stalkers or murderers - or at least, no more likely than anyone else - but that the immense cultural differences between the UK and the Ukraine, to say nothing of the lack of a shared language, make it extraordinarily unlikely that most of these arrangements will go well. I'm sure that Victoria Virtue of Islington Gardens is imaging a sweet wide-eyed housemate who will regale her with Ukrainian folklore when not cooking up a traditional feast in the kitchen, whilst being a wonderful object of fascination to all Vicky's oh-so right-on friends - who she'll fit right in with, of course (just as soon as they've explained to her the concept of "preferred pronouns" and why the five-year-old boy next door goes to school in a dress).

The reality is likely to be... a little different. The Ukraine is not a big fan of the UK, nor of the degenerate West in general, and Ukrainians certainly aren't "liberals". They're generally traditional, conservative, and nationalistic. You know, all those totally evil characteristics that Vicky Virtue has spent the rest of her life telling everyone how much she despises. Ukrainians are also very well aware that the UK has completely ignored the dreadful situation there for the last 7 years, despite there being plenty of people of Ukrainian extraction over here that have tried to tell them about it (see image below). So, rather than being simpering, wide-eyed, and oh-so grateful, Ukrainian refugees might feel - and express - something a little bit different.

If the UK Government was serious about helping refugees assimilate to life in the UK, they would run specialist intensive orientation programmes with highly skilled and experienced professionals, and accommodate these refugees in appropriate environments with specialist support, translators, and so on.

That they are not doing this, but rather, are dumping them with skill-free strangers in a totally mismatched environment where everything could - and often will - go catastrophically wrong, demonstrates this is nothing but another devious part of the destruction agenda. The stresses of trying to make a household work with the addition of traumatised foreign strangers who you can't communicate with and who might hate you, on top of healing yourself and your family from the traumas of the last two years (including rehabilitating often deeply damaged children), and trying to manage the new extremely stressful challenges associated with soaring living costs - well, this is going to be far too much for many people. It will finish them off psychologically, and THIS is the point of such a reckless, ridiculous scheme.

You can be sure this is nothing but the Government mocking the masses, when you consider that the Government that is now paying you to have strangers come and live with you, is the same Government who threatened to fine you if you had your own family over for Christmas in 2020. This is also the same Government who enthusiastically encouraged you to ban unvaccinated family members from the Christmas dinner table last year - and yet is now telling you to let unvaccinated strangers come and live in your house.

People who capitulate to all of these commands uncritically are explicitly confirming that the Government (or more precisely, the media) owns their minds. Several people have said to me, "but don't you sympathise with the people who care so much about Ukraine?!" - no, because they don't. If you'd asked these same people three months ago what they thought about Ukraine (where, I repeat, war has been raging for 8 years), they would either have had no opinion or they would have condemned it as being a "right-wing extremist" country, as that's what the UK media said about it until 5 minutes ago. The screenshot included above encapsulates the reality perfectly - that the great majority of people don't care about anything, even when they know about it through personal sources, until the media tells them to.

If these people care so much about Ukraine, then tell me why they aren't equally distressed about the situation in Yemen? Why they aren't welcoming Palestinian refugees to come and live with them? Why they don't throw open their hospitality to any of the thousands of people right here in this country in desperate personal turmoil?

It's because the media hasn't told them to. It really is as simple and as awful as that.

Six months from now, they'll have forgotten all about Ukraine, just like our local pub instantly forgot all about Covid (which it had been ultra-strict about) as soon as Ukraine came along. This pub has now replaced all its Covid "decorations" (sanitiser bottles at every table, social distancing stickers everywhere, and stern signs banning drinking at the bar) with reams of Ukrainian flags, fundraising posters, and an offer to "Drink 4 Ukraine" - whereby drinks have a 40% mark-up on them to "help".

Please note that PayPal, Nat West, Tesco, Marks & Spencers, The Daily Mail, The Independent and many, many other big corporate entities also claim to be "fundraising for Ukraine", and if people can't see that when all corporate giants go lockstep over "fundraising", that it's nothing but another massive wealth transfer to further enrich the coffers of the ultra-rich (who have become much wealthier during "the pandemic"), then I really don't know what to tell you, other than: you're being played - again.

"But Miri, don't you care about the poor Ukrainians?!" - I care about human misery and wish there was less of it, but the Ukrainians certainly don't have a monopoly on suffering and millions of people around the world are enduring situations of comparable horror. But nobody mentions them or fundraises for them or flies their flag, simply because the media hasn't told them to, and I find that nauseating, vacuous, and awful. Have some real principles, don't just be an empty vessel and mindless marionette perennially jerked around by the media and its latest cause celebre.

My principles have remained the same before, during, and after the pandemic, and they will remain the same before, during, and after the Ukraine crisis. Those principles are that I strenuously oppose corruption, deceit, and injustice, and I will expose and challenge these things wherever I see them.

The place you will always see them the most are in the state-bankrolled propaganda organs known as "the media", and in that most deeply corrupt, deviously deceitful, and criminally unjust entity of all - the Government.

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