There is a tendency in politics to claim that every policy initiative is “world beating”. During the pandemic, we had global-leading vaccine programmes, the best testing regime, the most advanced genome sequencing and the rest. Nothing was ever run-of-the-mill, or too late.

So it is with the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where ministers insist Britain has led the free world. Certainly Boris Johnson has been in the vanguard of international leaders in denouncing Putin’s intentions and actions. He has issued a six-point plan designed to forge a grand coalition to coordinate a strategy that will ensure the Russians fail and “are seen to have failed”.

But in one regard the UK can be accused of complacency. The imposition of sanctions on named individuals has lagged behind that of other countries. If Putin’s regime and its supporters are really to feel pain the riches they have accumulated over the past 30 years must be denied them.

In the Commons today, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill will finally make an appearance, spurred on by the events in Ukraine. The measure has long been discussed and a draft was prepared four years ago. It includes a register of overseas entities owning UK properties first announced by David Cameron in 2016. The Government is expected to accept amendments that would allow for the immediate targeting of people who are already subject to sanctions imposed by the US or EU.

If there is tardiness, however, it is a function of the rule of law and the understandable reluctance simply to strip all Russians of property and wealth. It is one thing to freeze assets pending investigations of the legality of acquisition, quite another to confiscate them.

Yet a fixation on individual oligarchs does not necessarily have much impact on Russian actions other than through the faint hope that they might pressurise Putin to stop. Indeed, in freezing some £258.8  billion of banks’ assets as opposed to £33.8 billion by the EU, the UK has arguably caused more damage to the Kremlin war machine. This should not be a contest, however, but a united Western effort to destabilise Putin by whatever means.

Moreover, European countries accusing the British of dragging their heels over oligarchs are pouring money into Russian coffers through their dependency on its oil and gas. They have to understand that to really hurt Putin some of the pain will have to be absorbed by their own people.