Britain doesn’t need ‘reform’. It just needs to rejoin the EU | William Keegan

Well-intentioned moves are afoot to overhaul the machinery of government'. But it's the policies that are the problem

It was Dr Johnson, not Boris Johnson, who declared patriotism is a last refuge of the scoundrel". Some years have passed since Johnson, Shirley Williams and I were guests of an institute outside Moscow. We were there to explain what we hoped were the wonders of western democracy - the freedom, the politics and the economic policies - to Russian politicians and academics who were glorying in having shaken off the constraints of the Soviet Union.

Alas, the glory days were not to last. Along came the so-called oligarchs, and then Putin. The ancient Greek word oligarkhia meant rule by the few". But in the post-Soviet world it came to denote a group of people who stripped the nation of its prime economic assets and became very rich - more plutocrats than oligarchs. We all know the consequences: the collapse of the Soviet Union evolved into rule by dictatorship, with the plutocrats fleeing abroad from Putin.