The last few decades have seen the west become obsessed with all things woke. We are more concerned about using the correct pronouns, or the correct collective nouns, or stopping to think before we address anyone by gender, quite frankly the whole thing has become race to the bottom of social bankruptcy.

We’ve allowed a sulky, vegan teenager from Sweden to dictate the West’s energy policy.

How’s that working out for you?

As Russian tanks roll towards the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, which I predict will be taken by Sunday, the woke West, with its self-destructive obsession with net zero, has only itself to blame. Far from challenging and threatening the evil dictator Vladimir Putin, following his completely unacceptable annexation of Crimea in 2014, we have instead enriched him with the purchase of billions of dollars of oil, coal and gas and we have given him the strategic whip hand over countries like Germany.

The Germans now look set to have a very expensive and cold winter, given their reliance on old Vladimir’s fuel.

The sanctions meted out to Putin have been weaker than an arm wrestle with your grandma, and the Europeans are dragging their heels on blocking Russia’s access to the Swift global payments system – something we are ready to do – and which would hurt Moscow bigtime.

What we are witnessing now, as apartment blocks in the democratic nation of Ukraine are struck by missiles, is a failure of values.

The west, so complacent and arrogant in their economic and military dominance, have turned a blind eye to what’s actually been going on. They’ve been asleep at the wheel. Anyone could’ve told you that Vladimir Putin has for years been trying to reassemble the Soviet union, a hellish totalitarian bloc we thought we’d consigned to the dustbin of history, under the heroic leadership of Ronald Reagan, Michael Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher.

That’s political leadership.

And the real crime here is that we have helped Vlad the bad all the way. Here in the UK for example, we have deliberately chosen not to have energy independence. According to the Mail’s Ross Clark, we have chosen to ignore potentially 20 years worth of oil in the North Sea, five decades worth of clean shale gas from under our feet and potentially five hundred years worth of coal, deep in the ground.

We’ve also torn ourselves apart with the woke take over of our culture and history.

Tearing down statues and desecrating our glorious past. One which was not perfect, of course, but which has seen billions of people lifted out of poverty, and democracy and free markets rolled out across the world.

I’d love to know why we’ve got to apologise for that. The woke West is now more interested in pronouns than peace.

In the same week that the MI5 chief Ken Mccallum rightly said that our way of life is now under threat from the likes of Russia, China and Islamic extremists, a leaked guide to improving diversity and inclusion in the security services suggests that spies should check their white privilege and avoid gendered terms such as ‘manpower’ and words such as ‘strong’ and ‘grip’ which can ‘reinforce dominant cultural patterns’. Get a grip.

Why we’ve been attacking men of late is a total mystery to me. Because whilst we have incredible women in the military – of course – we’re going to be relying on one hell of a lot of toxic masculinity, if our soldiers are ultimately dragged into this sorry mess.

And then there’s the pandemic. Another example of stupefying western arrogance. When in human history have we ever successfully stopped a seasonal respiratory virus?

But oh no, the west knew better. We will send this virus packing said Boris Johnson. And Joe Biden declared war on Covid. A nasty virus yes but one non-fatal to most and with a third having no symptoms at all – it’s not a war. Do me a favour. Helicopters and fighter jets flying over Ukraine, China with aerial manoeuvres over Taiwan. That’s what a bloody war looks like.

But deliberately crippling our economy for two years as a matter of pandemic policy, has diminished the tools we would need to fight this real war. This truly existential crisis. I hate to be right, it doesn’t happen very often. But I’ve been stuck record since March 2020 about the billions we are borrowing and burning in this fruitless war against Covid, reducing our economic firepower for and this is a direct quote “a future pandemic, potentially worse than this one, a future natural disaster or God forbid, a future war”.

Well here we are. We’ve appeased Putin for a decade and it hasn’t worked. Another pint-sized dictator French President Emanuel Macron was humiliated this week in a phone call with Vladimir Putin, who told the Frenchman where to go.

He knows his onions does old Vladimir. Not a great reward for Macron’s love bombing of Putin over the years. That’s what happens when you suck up to a bully. But this has been the abiding theme for too long. The West’s botched departure from Afghanistan was the very essence of what a weak foreign policy looks like. It equates in no uncertain terms to surrender.

Yes we want jaw-jaw, as Churchill used to describe diplomacy, and a diplomatic solution could still be in the offing once old Vladimir has flexed his muscles strutted his stuff and proved his point. So where do we go from here? Well we change tack. We need a plan for power.

It’s time to completely scrap the so-called war on Covid and get back to an active, uncompromising, thriving economy with which to pay for the colossal investment required by our armed services, as well as all of the other offices of state battered by bonkers lockdowns.

We need planes, helicopters, troops, counter terrorism, counter cyber – you name it we’ve got to counter it. We need all of that, rather than rainbow pedestrian crossings and gender inclusive police cars. We need robust energy independence.

I would like to see the exploitation of every drop of shale gas you can find and until renewables can punch their weight, which in time they will, and we must develop that too, then oil and gas on our own shores will see us through.

And we need to recalibrate our attitude to risk, given what was in my view an overreaction to a virus mild for most. So this is it folks, it’s a wake up call. A reality check. A woke country is a broke country, as we are finding out.

It’s time to fight for the very essence of what Western societies stand for.

It’s time for Britain and its allies to man up and grow a pair. Because if we don’t, with China, Russia and others circling their wagons around the free world, it may be lost forever.