I WAS in the archetypal London black taxi at the weekend, listening to my cabbie holding forth on his phone with a mate. Cabbie was lamenting Brexit, which he had voted for. His complaint was that the world had suddenly gone to pieces after Brexit. The economy was a mess and getting messier. Nigel Farage had turned out to be a stooge of Moscow. Indeed, the Brexit referendum result was probably a Moscow plot. It would have to be re-run and the outcome reversed.

The litany went on as the cabbie cheerfully negotiated his way round Extinction Rebellion street blockades. He was not happy with how Labour’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, was running things. But when did a London cabbie ever think any mayor was up to the job? The interesting thing was that my driver happily claimed to be “right wing” – his phrase. His animus was less against Labour than “the system” and the fact that “everything is falling apart”. His disenchantment with Rishi Sunak was volcanic, denouncing the Chancellor for squeezing out every last penny in tax rises.

As a rule, I usually discount the political commentary of taxi drivers (a very necessary and put-upon tribe, I hastily add). But it seemed to me this conversation might be a straw in the wind. Certainly, it confirms that Rishi Sunak’s chances of entering Number 10 are now toast. Sunak has proved himself politically naïve, ideologically rigid and far too petulant for the Big Time. His moment has come and gone, leaving Boris Johnson with no immediate rivals this side of the next General Election.

But it is on matters European that my cabbie’s diatribe indicates a potential political volte-face.

The Tory government shows no sign whatsoever of delivering on its promises that Brexit will improve living standards or economic growth. Quite the reverse, in fact. And while Priti Patel continues with her subterranean policy of excluding Ukrainian refugees, Marine Le Pen in France has actually gained traction in the French presidential contest by embracing the plight of fleeing Ukrainians. She has reversed her party’s traditional anti-immigrant policy and welcomed Ukrainians fleeing the Russian Bear. Of course, it helps (as far as Le Pen is concerned) that the Ukrainians are white. But in the UK, polls indicate a deep disenchantment with Patel’s failure to help the Ukrainian refugees.

Has the European worm turned? Is a British rapprochement with the EU possible, even if only in the form of some revised “special arrangement”? There are possible arguments in favour (note my taxi driver). First and foremost, the Ukraine crisis has revitalised if not transformed the European project. The external threat from Moscow has united Europe in a common cause for the first time in decades. Britain can’t help but become part of this.

But there is an alternative point of view. Namely that despite the pressure on Europe to unite against a common external threat, the tectonic plates are still shifting against the so-called European project – defined as the post-Second World War evolution towards political and economic unity.

In fact, if we take off our rose-coloured spectacles for a minute, there is just as much evidence that the Ukraine crisis will accelerate European disunity over the long run.

After the end of the Cold War in 1989, Nato’s mission was over historically. But instead of bringing Nato to a close, a raft of states (some new) in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus were incorporated into its orbit, and the American-led alliance transformed into a tool for projecting Washington’s hegemony in a unipolar political world.

Unfortunately for this project, the world did not stay unipolar for very long. A raft of competing regional powers emerged – China but also Turkey, Iran, Russia, and even Saudi Arabia – to challenge the West’s right to determine the new world order. We are now living with the uncertain consequences.

Not all the European countries are persuaded they need to join in with this re-iteration of Nato – even after the invasion of Ukraine. Hungary’s extreme-right strongman, Viktor Orban, just won an unexpected, landslide re-election on a “peace” platform of not provoking Russia.

It suited Orban to fend off the opposition parties by pretending to be a peacemaker. And this appealed to a rattled Hungarian electorate. It helped, of course, that Orban controls the Hungarian media. Which raises the obvious question: why is Hungary still accepted in the EU? Perhaps because the EU prefers quantity to quality. But is that really sustainable?

The answer is probably no. For we are seeing a gradual shift to the populist right across the EU that is undermining Europe’s democratic credentials. With the erosion of internal democracy in Europe, the chances of maintaining a common front – economically or politically – diminish rapidly. Take Poland, whose right-wing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was denounced by France’s President Macron as being an antisemite. Morawiecki’s administration has brought in laws banning any blame being put on Poles for the Holocaust – though anyone with the slightest knowledge of history knows there were antisemitic riots in Poland after the end of the Second World War. Poland is to the forefront of pushing Nato to confront Moscow.

Meanwhile, in Italy there is widespread opposition to supplying weapons to Ukraine and the rightist parties are balking at increasing defence spending. In France, on the other hand, Macron thought he had a walkover re-election campaign by concentrating his efforts on the Ukraine crisis.

Initially his poll ratings shot up. But his main rival, Le Pen, focused on criticising the fall in French living standards, itself exacerbated by the Ukraine war. Suddenly French voters, struggling to make ends meet, warmed to Le Pen. Not because they are pro-Moscow but because Le Pen’s relentless criticism of a failing European economy made voters open to change.

The European project is foundering precisely because it is no longer delivering prosperity. Even a perceived threat from Moscow will not trump this economic failure.

We are experiencing the second wave of the revolt against neoliberal globalism. Some thought that nativist populism (a la Trump, Johnson, Orban and Le Pen) had gone away. The wave of liberal interventionism in Europe and the UK following the invasion of Ukraine seemed to exemplify a new internationalism and European unity.

But dig deeper and the causes of the nativist, populist upsurge have not gone away. If anything, the worsening economic crisis will detonate a second round of populism, in Europe especially. Dangerously, the bellicose response to the Russian invasion among liberals is helping remove some of the normal democratic brakes on populist nationalism. We are seeing this in Poland and in Ukraine itself, where President Zelenskyy has banned many opposition parties with no criticism from the EU.

What are the implications in Scotland? Scottish public opinion remains besotted with the EU without fully understanding the vast tensions emerging in the bloc – tensions that the Ukraine crisis could exacerbate eventually. If nothing else, growing divisions between centrist and populist governments in the EU will stymie efforts at economic recovery. The SNP are blithely ignoring such complications.

As for the UK, Chancellor Sunak has wilfully failed to understand the need to tackle the fall in real incomes. Any London taxi driver could have warned him about that.