Like everyone else – certainly everyone in Europe – Ukraine is on my mind. It seems redundant for a random blogger in Edinburgh to bloviate about it, but, rather like my Covid diary, that is kinda the point of having a blog like this which functions as a hybrid diary and journal (and an ad hoc vehicle for bloviating.) I don’t pretend any special insight, and everything I write here is necessarily personal and provisional, but here’s my current tuppence worth.

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There’s a story, quite probably apocryphal, that at the outset of WW2 Winston Churchill mused on outcomes and what the end of the war would mean for Germany and, by implication, Europe. That isn’t a million miles away from the old programme management notion of Outcomes > Strategy > Tactics. I am in no way qualified to muse on outcomes for Ukraine and Russia, but I have been thinking about outcomes for the UK and Europe.

My starting point is one articulated by most commentators – that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has, within days, reaffirmed the importance of both NATO and the European Union. (This is worth a read: Putin Loses No Matter How This Plays Out – But We Might Too.) That is despite Putin’s best efforts to destablise both of those institutions through Trump and Brexit and their associated fellow travellers. In consequence, the stupidities of Brexit are once more laid bare. This country has isolated itself from decision making in what is one of the major geopolitical blocs, a bloc that, despite all that Brexiteers said about it, turns out to be able to move very quickly when it wants to.

That we are left isolated when the government is stuffed with the most corrupt and inept Cabinet in memory is the cherry on the cake. With every day that passes, the incompetence and pettifoggery of Priti Vacant and Liz Truss is allowed to make things worse. The Tory party as a whole is too drenched in Russian money and influence to have any ability to do what needs to be done to isolate and sanction Putin and his croneys.

The current issues with visas for refugees and their families (and we are the only country requiring visas) are not merely symptomatic of the Tories’ incompetence and meanspiritedness, it’s worse than that. This is how the system has been designed to work by sociopaths and ideologues egged on by a compliant right-wing press that pretends to be unable to see a distinction between the economic migrant and the refugee. These are the people who questioned whether the RNLI should bother to save the lives of asylum seekers, the Home Secretary who thought out loud about using the Royal Navy to stop boats at sea and push them back to France until the MoD told her where to go.

The government is caught on the horns of its own infernal dilemma: if it recognises the plight of Ukrainian refugees, they’ll have to recognise the rest too, which grates on every fibre of their being. All they have left is to flounder, gaslight and lie. From the top down, they continue to say that we are ‘world-leading.’ This is, and always has been, bollocks.

In the meantime, the government is forced also, through gritted teeth, to acknowledge that the BBC, which stepped up to the crease with educational programming for children during Covid lockdown, which the appalling Nadine Dorries is fond of threatening, turns out to be a potent and respected source of trusted information via the World Service – the same World Service that the Foreign Office has persistently sought to defund and shrink through successive administrations.

Also in the meantime, a wing of the Tory party, to which the loathsome Nigel Farrage remains tenuously linked via slug trails of odiousness, has taken to pondering the notion of Net Zero and how beastly it is for their oil-producing chums (including Mr Putin and his oligarchs.) Putin’s war has forced a serious and timely crunch time in decision making, not only for oil and gas, but also for energy provision in general. It looks likely to reinforce a push for renewables and alternatives in a way that increasingly apocalyptic IPCC reports haven’t. As it happens, I agree that we should question the idea of Net Zero – because I think we need to set actual zero as the target outcome and find strategies for achieving that.

One of the possible outcomes of Putin’s War and the sanctions now in place may well be that Russia becomes, to all intents and purposes, a vassal state of China. That’s why I think that China – taking their customary long view – won’t be too unhappy if Putin’s murderous adventurism is stopped. That would be a geopolitical shift of such a magnitude that a general realignment of Europe, the USA, the rest of the world and NATO would be inevitable. What then for Tory and Brexiteer visions of a post-Imperial Britain and its dreams of a Victorian paradise where we all ignore experts, identify fronted adverbials, learn Latin and know that Johnny-foreigner understands their place?

I think it puts us on course for some kind of associate status in Europe, however that comes to be tarted up to save blushes. How long it will take the Tories or the electorate to begin the process of rowing back from Brexit is an open question (as is the degree to which the EU would welcome us back), but that will now be the direction of travel, I think.

Standing all of the above, in the humanitarian instincts of the British people and the general outrage at Partygate, I see signs for optimism, though. Signs that the tide is on the turn, and that petty nationalism of all stripes can be seen for what it is: terminal.