THERE was a timely reminder of reality on Thursday when Martin Lewis, a respected personal finance commentator, observed that “we are seeing what may be potentially a deliberate narrative shift that effectively says the entire cost of living crisis is due to Ukraine and therefore we all need to make sacrifices”, adding: “The rises in energy, heating oil, water, council tax, broadband and mobiles, food, national insurance were all in place before Ukraine.”

Many of us predicted two years ago that the UK Government would endeavour to hide the cost of Brexit beneath the cost of the pandemic, which explained at least in part why Johnson would not accept any extension to the EU transition period. Now both may be further subsumed into a false assertion about the costs of war and the need for all of us to tighten our belts.

Truth is the first casualty of conflict and we are seeing that a-plenty in the despicable lies being told by Putin and his people including his Foreign Minister’s assertion that “we did not attack Ukraine”.

The only effective antidote to such perversion of the truth is the truth itself, yet in UK governance truth remains in short supply as can be seen from the dishonesty and spin surrounding the disgustingly inadequate Tory response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.

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Officially the byzantine, soul-destroying and nearly impossible application process is merely a necessary bulwark against potential abuse because the UK is, it is claimed, a magnet for the malignly inclined.

Priti Patel – a woman who once speculated about using possible food shortages in Ireland as a lever in the Brexit negotiations – even went so far as to phone her Irish counterpart to impertinently drive this piece of propaganda home.

In fact, the problems are a deliberate consequence of a long standing and deliberate policy. What is happening is what the Tories want to happen.

For a start, the UK visa service was privatised some years ago. While the ostensible aim was to make the service more efficient in fact the political impetus was to ensure that getting a visa became easier the richer you were, with the opposite of course also being true. It is therefore little surprise that this remains the case even in the direst of humanitarian emergencies.

However, the current arrangements have also provided a significant source of income not just for the company that has the contract but also for the UK Treasury .

The Chancellor would be strongly resistant to disrupting such a profitable arrangement even though the “service” was and remains a heartless disgrace as revealed by several reports including one from the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration just last November. Complaints from inside the system itself included lack of capacity, charging for unnecessary extra services and demanding “irrelevant” paper work. This hard line approach to migration was not invented by Priti Patel though. It was Theresa May who in 2010, when she became Home Secretary, announced that she intended to make drastic cuts in numbers coming to the UK , a pledge she repeated as Prime Minister when launching her ill fated election campaign in 2017.

She knew her gallery and she played to it, and indeed had always done so, for it was Theresa May who in 2012 had proudly announced – and then implemented with gusto – what she unashamedly called a “hostile environment” policy.

May revelled in her reputation as a hardline, anti-immigration Tory. It won her the keys to 10 Downing St after all , although she quickly lost them. Patel is simply following in her footsteps.

Moreover, given that this approach is now hardwired into operational practice after more than a decade in existence, there will be no Home Office civil servant or Border force official left in any senior position who has been expected to, or who knows how to, implement anything else even if there was a political will to deliver it.

Brexit – that empty lie about the future which we now know was keenly supported for divisive geo-political reasons by Putin and eased into place by Russian money – had as its foundation stone the idea of “taking back control”.

Chief amongst the areas for such action was migration and the dominant voice on that issue was Theresa May.

I have long thought that May was a closet Brexiteer, not unhappy about the result even though she shied away from the political risk of openly supporting it during the campaign.

It was obvious after the event that she was more than willing to take on the task of enforcing ever more draconian control of “our” borders and I recall several occasions at meetings at which she scornfully dismissed any suggestion that Scotland required a different approach given its demographics and labour market.

Indeed one of her senior ministers told me we were wasting our time arguing the point as she had in his words” a bee in her bonnet” about migration.

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So the seeds of the suffering of those from Ukraine being driven from pillar to post in their attempts to join family and friends in Scotland lie in UK Tory grandstanding on immigration more than a decade ago, exacerbated by a Brexit process that continued and exaggerated falsehoods about migrants and migration and , with tabloid support, demonised those who almost always made hugely positive contributions to a society when they got to join it.

A Brexit process which, though now proven to be crooked , is still being supported not just by those in hoc to it, but – to add a final note of incredulity to this shameful tale – by the Labour and LibDem leadership at Westminster.

Scotland is in a different position. It never chose Brexit, and the route back to EU membership is clear and open.

That route is now more essential than ever as the EU, far rom failing as Brexiteers predicted, re-establishes itself as a key global player and leaves an inward looking UK trailing in its wake.