“I think we leave Afghanistan with our tail between our legs, having achieved very little and with very few lessons having been learned. As someone who served in the British Army there, I feel a deep sense of shame that we’ve abandoned people. If we want to be able to salvage something from this, then how we treat those Afghan refugees, many of them fleeing for their lives, we have to step up to the plate.

The figure of 20,000 refugees that this government has plucked out of the air simply isn’t enough. The reason we need to offer tens of thousands more people safety here in our country is that we insisted on going over there.”