The government has announced that by New Year’s Day, not a single drop of Russian diesel or jet fuel will cross into British shores. A triumph of sovereignty, they call it. Finally, after two years of war and countless public harangues, we are wrenching ourselves free from the hydrocarbon tendrils of a hostile state.
One might ask: what took us so long? The answer, as ever, lies in the comfortable decadence of a nation that had forgotten what it means to stand on its own two feet. For decades, we traded our security for cheap fuel, our moral clarity for a warm cockpit on the M25.
Now, at the eleventh hour, we act like a man who decides to quit smoking only after his lungs have begun to blacken. Better late than never, but only just. The irony is thick enough to cut with a knife.
We prattle about net zero, about wind farms and heat pumps, yet we have been funding Putin’s war machine with every gallon of diesel we poured into our lorries and every gallon of jet fuel that lifted our holidaymakers to sunnier climes. Now, at last, we are forced to live by our principles. And what a slog it will be.
Our refiners will have to scramble, our trade routes will need to be redrawn, and our allies in the Gulf will surely demand a premium for their crude. The age of cheap Russian energy was a hangover from the Cold War, a strange trust in the enemy’s petrol. We are sober now, and sobriety is expensive.
But it is also a form of strength. The Victorians understood this. They built an empire on coal they dug from their own soil, on iron they forged in their own furnaces.
They did not rely on the goodwill of St Petersburg or Riyadh. We have become soft, dependent, and arrogant in our dependence. This phase-out is not merely a policy: it is a penance.
We must now pay for our sins of complacency with higher prices and harder choices. Yet there is a glint of hope in all this. For the first time in a generation, the government is actually doing something that prioritises national interest over quarterly profits.
It is a rare and beautiful thing, like seeing a Tory MP turn down a free lunch. The real test, of course, will come when the northern winds blow and the price of heating oil spikes. Will the government hold firm?
Or will it buckle under the inevitable howls of outrage from those who cannot see beyond their own thermostats? We shall see. For now, let us raise a glass of British gin (no Russian vodka, if you please) to a small but significant victory.
The road to sovereignty is paved with inconvenience, but it ends with dignity.
