At home, I have all kinds of books about the 1968 Prague Spring with pictures of Russian tanks arriving to punish a government that had strayed too far from Moscow’s line. The aim is to show my children the horrors from which their grandparents fled and remind them that, while they are as British as Pimm’s and Vindaloo, they are descended, in part, from refugees. So when we talk about handling today’s asylum seekers, a good question to ask is: what if that were us?

Britain’s record on this is part excellent – and part awful. To turn back desperate Ukrainians, ordering them to complete all kinds of paperwork, is baffling for a country that made such a bold and generous offer to the Hong Kong Chinese and spent more than any European country helping Syrian refugees. We may prefer to help those in overseas camps, but there will always be people heading here – as Prague Spring emigres once did. So how to handle new arrivals? See them as a menace to be deterred, or friends in need?

It’s a difficult call in many cases, but not this time. When Ukraine’s hospitals are being shelled and mass graves filled (as is now happening), no one needs to ask if mothers arriving with children have a reasonable case for asylum. The only question – at least, the only decent question – is how quickly can they be helped.

First, Priti Patel claimed no Ukrainian heading to Britain was being sent back. Then she claimed that British officials were on hand at Calais to help. Neither claim was true. This points not to her fibbing, but the dysfunctionality of the department she runs: even she was being misinformed about the basics. The Home Office is known as Whitehall’s capital of cluelessness, where all kinds of things go wrong for reasons no one can fathom. Its love of bureaucracy is equal only to its inability to get things done.

Meanwhile at Berlin Central train station, Ukrainian refugees have been greeted by locals holding up placards offering accommodation and paired on the spot. Polish households have so far absorbed 1.4 million Ukrainians and are paid a nightly allowance for those they put up. Germans are offering up spare rooms via websites like Airbnb: Germany’s Interior Ministry has counted private offers of 350,000 beds in all. It only expects 200,000 Ukrainians. An unprecedented human need has met an unprecedented public response – and government has not got in the way.

Compare this to Britain where the Home Office forbids refugees from working or supporting themselves in any way, and insists on putting them up in hotels at a cost averaging about £200 a night. Almost 50,000 have now been waiting more than six months for their case to be heard – but are told to stay on welfare. This appalls many government ministers, who see a tragic waste of both taxpayers’ money and human potential.

In theory, it is a deterrent. The idea of being incarcerated in a decaying hotel and forced to stay on the dole is supposed to make migrants think twice about boarding the small boats – which have been one of Boris Johnson’s biggest headaches. The Prime Minister’s instincts have been liberal (he still, personally, backs an amnesty for undcoumented migrants) but he accepts that his voters are furious about his failure to control the people smugglers who now do such roaring trade crossing the Channel.

And it’s the Prime Minister’s hesitation which is, currently, the biggest obstacle to a more generous settlement for Ukrainians. It’s widely assumed that Ms Patel, often seen as the angry face of Tory intransigence, is the one insisting on all of the extra hurdles. At present, for example, the Home Office asks applicants to prove they are related to a permanent UK resident. Quite a test – and one my wife’s family, when they fled the Russian tanks, would have failed.

But on Wednesday evening, Patel asked for permission to widen the sponsorship criteria to include any Ukrainian in Britain, not just those with permanent residency (eg, students or temporary workers). A response was requested by 8am the next morning, indicating a sense of panic. But it was rejected by No10, which fears 200,000 Ukrainians will somehow clear the bureaucratic hurdles already set. Make things any easier, runs the logic, and we could end up with more than 300,000 refugees. In public, Boris Johnson is promising to do “everything humanly possible” for Ukrainians. This, to put it politely, is an exaggeration.

The Home Secretary will be mindful that her family’s story is also a story of people seeking sanctuary in Britain. Her parents moved here when it started to become dangerous for Asians in Uganda: a Tory government ended up flying over 27,000 of those persecuted by Idi Amin. When she joined forces with Dominic Raab (the son of a Jewish refugee) to push for a settlement for Hong Kong, he’d argue – privately – that they both acted very much with their family history in mind. Neither talk much about this in public.

Perhaps it suits Tories to be seen as flinty-hearted over migration, a reputation that tends not to hurt at election time. But this is what can confuse issues now, blurring a sense of national duty and making Britain the last country in Europe to realise (for example) that it’s absurd to ask fleeing refugees to upload biometric details before they’re given sanctuary.

This should be the crisis that jolts the Home Office into a better way of handling asylum. Airbnb has been asking Brits to register spare rooms that might be used for refugees; some 2,500 hosts have offered space so far. Would it be so hard to match those arriving with willing hosts, as the Poles and Germans have done? And given that we have a record 1.3 million vacancies in the economy, would it be so bad to let Ukrainians work while they’re here?

Earlier this week I bumped into James Heappey, the Armed Forces minister, who had overseen the Afghan refugee upheaval last summer. Troops who helped evacuate Afghans may now be sent to Poland to handle applications from Ukrainian refugees who want to come to Britain. (The Home Office says its staff out there need to watch their hours due to the EU’s Working Time Directive, from which soldiers are exempt.) I asked Heappey if the paperwork is really necessary: wouldn’t a passport suffice? “Watch this space,” he replied. A great many Ukrainians will be watching. And hoping.