Alex Massie Alex Massie

Tory Europhobia cripples Britain’s attitude to the Ukrainian crisis

Colin Freeman, the Telegraph’s fine chief foreign correspondent, made a remarkable claim the other day that merits wider attention. What, he asked, was Britain’s view on the crisis in Ukraine? The answer was revealing for many reasons, not the least of which being the extent to which eurosceptic myopia has, according to Freeman, caused Britain to misjudge the dramatic events unfolding in Kiev and elsewhere. According to Freeman:

The depth of Euro-scepticism in Britain meant it cared little either way when Ukraine was gearing up last year to sign an EU trade agreement that would have brought it out of the Russian orbit. In Downing Street, the view was that Europe’s outer borders were already quite extended enough. So when Ukraine failed to sign the deal, following pressure from Mr Putin, No 10 deemed it a blow only to empire-builders in Brussels.

If true – and there is little reason to doubt Freeman’s sources – this is, as I say, both remarkable and revealing. Wrong and stupid, too.

It suggests that Downing Street believed – perhaps still believes – that the battle for the Ukraine is a zero sum game between the European Union and Vladimir Putin. A kind of Iran-Iraq War on the Dnieper in which Downing Street and the FCO hoped both sides might lose. At the very least better a stalemate than a clear victory for either side.

Perhaps this should not surprise us. There are, after all, plenty of Conservatives (and Kippers, of course) happy to talk about something called the EUSSR. In one of many such examples, Janet Daley once suggested that with regard to Europe ‘our hope can only be that the peoples of the EU will one day walk out from under their oppressors, just as the people of the Warsaw Pact walked out from under theirs.

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