War has highlighted the geopolitical folly of Britain’s departure from the EU
The Australian comedian Bill Kerr used to begin his BBC appearances with: “I don’t want to worry you, but …” Funny how those words came back to me last week as I watched the television coverage of the criminal bombing of homes in Ukraine.
Some of us are old enough to remember Hitler’s bombing of London, Coventry and elsewhere, not forgetting Britain’s bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut’s book about it, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a disturbing classic.
It was because European, and American, leaders – let alone their people – never wished to witness such horrors again that the European movement began. Now here we are, with the tyrant in the Kremlin repeating such horrifying scenes in Europe, yes Europe.
Putin is the modern epitome of Lord Acton’s famous and well-phrased dictum: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Quite apart from the inhumanity and carnage, in his infinite folly Putin has set off a process of economic and social disruption which compounds the many obvious crises that the world already faced.
As energy prices soar, memories are being revived in the UK of the 1970s, when the first oil crisis of 1973-74 was a major factor in unseating the 1970-74 government of Edward Heath, and also sowed the seeds of the ultimate failure of the Wilson and Callaghan governments of 1974-79.
The sight of our egregious prime minister Boris Johnson going, oil can in hand, to Middle Eastern dictators to plead for economic help to counteract damage inflicted by another dictator, Putin, evokes an uncomfortable memory. When Labour chancellor Denis Healey was besieged in 1976 by rampant inflation and a balance of payments crisis, the Treasury’s top civil servant, my good friend the late Sir Douglas Wass, tried to
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