Lorries carrying aid to Ukraine stuck at Dover because of…. well, you guessed it – Some charities have even given up, saying “it doesn’t make sense to spend so much time and money dealing with the bureaucracy.”

32 comments

  3. Send your money to EU nations who don’t have this problem. This is the fastest way to help Ukraine.

  4. My mrs works for a local refugee aid charity. They are the only organisation within about 100 miles that knows that you now need paperwork and a process in place to get aid across Europe.

    Every group around is now giving all of their donations and collections to them to distribute. We see talking thousands of tons of stuff now. Some drive from Scotland to ports to jump on ferries with van loads of stuff to unsurprisingly be turned around and sent home. Several hundred miles of round trip later her charity gets told we dumped 50 boxes outside last night in the rain and it’s your problem now and why didn’t you tell us we need paperwork?

    It’s a nightmare. A well meaning nightmare and they are begging people to just send money to the Red Cross, UNHCR or DEC.

    Partly because of logistics but also partly because this isn’t a refugee camp in a desert we are supporting where you can’t source anything locally. A metric fuck ton of all this aid will end up being sold in Poland and Moldova etc.

    If you pack up a load of boxes of random shit all that happens is it’s sits there until a volunteer can unpack it, list all the contents and repack it in an organised way with all the paperwork and absolutely everything documented properly.

    Folks want to slips sweets into the pockets of kids jackets. Awesome, except if a random inspection finds sweets in a package and they aren’t listed the whole fucking truck is stopped and every box opened delaying the whole lot and probably the three other trucks they also sent in convoy.

    Half of you fucks voted for this shit and this is the new reality. Wake the fuck up. This isn’t like the old days anymore. We fucked that up spectacularly and so my house is full of shit from well meaning people who don’t realise we left Europe, there’s literally thousands upon thousands of tons of stuff that basically a handful of people around the country are working balls out to organise and document

    If you want to help please do, but send money to the big funds, or think about giving up just an hour to go help sort out boxes locally

    And slap the first person you see who moans about the paperwork

  5. My second guess would have been a Farage-Patel supervillain team-up, attacking by night wearing stealth outfits and cutting fuel lines.

  6. One of the key points if Brexit was to stop people doing things. So this is Brexit behaving exactly as designed. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s the same with the lost jobs and the wasted money and all the other features (they are features, not bugs).

  7. >Charity workers say that five tonnes of donations are still in the UK because of confusion over paperwork.

    For clarity, that’s about a fifth of a single lorry.

  8. It probably doesn’t make sense to gather physical stuff in the UK and ship it to Ukraine. Would be better to collect money and use it to pay for goods that are already within a few hundred miles of the border.

  9. Let’s be honest here – as articles go, the type of people who it’s trying to embarrass don’t actually want to help anyone abroad so these delays are a bonus for them.

    They don’t even want to help our own unfortunates (as we saw with the free school meals during lockdown issue recently), so Ukrainian refugees are hardly going to register on the sympathy scale.

  10. I keep seeing people trying to donate grotty old teddies and I get it, not everyone has money to donate and they want to feel they are doing something but I would prefer those people to donate nothing and share links to charities. I can’t understand trucking stuff from a non EU country, through the whole EU, when the goods are things that could be purchased in the countries the refugees are in

  13. WELL HOW DID PEOPLE TRADE BEFORE THE EU, THEN?????

    Like this. They sat in enormous queues and filled in loads of paperwork. Or they made agreements to reduce trade friction.

  14. I don’t get headlines like this. In my area a group of people have created a bit of a local organisations with some collection points at a couple of churches and a scout hut and are sending about a van a day over plus some ambulances filled with more boxes. They had to learn how to wrap and manifest the boxes properly after some initial glitches, but it’s now a constant stream and they are all well meaning amateurs that know nothing about customs.

    It seems like these blogs seek out a problem case whilst thousands of other groups have cracked on.

  16. The UK has brought a lifetime’s worth of shame on itself with the avalanche of lies, misleading information, cronyism and blatant corruption from this shitshow of a government.

    And yet my dad in law still states that ‘Boris knows what he’s doing’. Yes, indeed he does, and it’s not for anyone benefit but himself and his mates.

  18. Another day, another upvoted story by a Russian funded website designed to distract and provoke animosity between allies.

  19. It’s almost like brexit benefited Putin more than we like to say, stops so many good brits from going and helping, brexit and this war has been planned for a long time

  20. Brexit was an enemy attack aided by Russia and implemented by Tory/UKIP traitors operating at the highest levels of politics.

  25. There was a woman on sky news talking about how she asked her little girl, and she agreed, reluctantly to give away her favourite toys and teddy bears and sleeping bags to donate to Ukrainians in Poland. I think people underestimate how cheap these products are sold from their manufacturers in Asia before being shipped to Europe, marketed and sold with layers of tax and wages applied throughout the process. Teddy bears, 20p at a push for a small one. Sleeping bags? If it’s a kids sleeping back for sleepovers etc, £1 at a push. I know they mean well, but it’s really unnecessary.

  26. The same people who complain about the bureaucracy also voted for brexit? So, which way do you want it?

  27. Some locals here are taking three lorries over soon. I feel bad for judging it as simply a crusade. Surely they’re going to run into problems??

  28. We sanctioned Russia but the government chose to go for something that has a similar effect as sanctions on trade with Europe.

    We still can’t even export whisky to the US as the US only relaxed EU sanctions and left us out.

  30. To be fair, sending most supplies direct from the UK is a stupid idea anyway

    Aye, we’ll just fill a lorry with nappies at £10/pack and then spend £1000 in diesel taking it halfway across the continent… to somewhere that nappies cost £5

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