Global Britain: Myth In Crisis

In March 2021, Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, wrote an introduction to a report he had commissioned called Global Britain in a Competitive Age. The report purported to delineate the role the United Kingdom would play in the world up in the years up to 2025. (Boris assumed he would be in power for years).

His priority, along with predictable items such as defending frontiers against threats, combating terrorism, tackling climate change and continuing to play a leading role in science was the maintenance of Global British military power. The new aircraft carrier (HMS Queen Elizabeth) one of the two largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy, would patrol the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Pacific, though it was not clear why since, in the South China Sea, the Chinese could sink it in minutes.

In his faux Churchillian tones, Boris Johnson announced that the UK would remain a ‘beacon of democratic sovereignty’ as well as ‘one of the most influential countries in the world’. This kind of bluster is typical of former colonial powers. When something serious happens in the world only the French and the British ask themselves what they should be doing. The Germans and the Japanese know better, as do the Italians. History has taught them some lessons.

The rhetoric of Global Britain had been developed in direct response to Brexit. In October 2016, the then Prime Minister Theresa May (originally not a Brexiteer herself) deployed the slogan as an ambitious vision for Britain after Brexit in which the UK, finally free from regulations imposed by Brussels, would govern itself, promote free trade, peace and prosperity. Johnson was then foreign secretary and he argued that a post-Brexit UK should take advantage of opportunities beyond Europe, ‘beginning with some of those dynamic Commonwealth economies that are already queuing up to do free trade deals’. In fact, all that happened was that the UK simply accepted the EU’s external trade deals already in existence. Even the ‘new’ trade deal with Japan replicates an old one. So far there  been no new major trade deal with India or the USA.

British foreign policy is not independent and has not been so since the Suez crisis of 1956. The country follows the coordinates set by a real global power: the USA.

The rhetoric about ‘Global Britain’ should not surprise. The idea had been deployed regularly by all British governments since 1945. The Empire was disappearing, but not its mythology. The loss of the Empire required a story. Why did so many countries wished to give up the benefits of being a colony? Why were they not grateful? Could it be that the story of the empire, the British equivalent of the French mission civilisatrice, taught to generations of school children, needed to change?

The Commonwealth, an institution empty of any significant powers, was presented as the natural succession to the empire. The British monarch could be the head of the Commonwealth. This, in the view of the British political establishment, might ease the shock of losing the largest colonial empire that ever was.

The shock was all in the mind of the political elites. Opinion polls have confirmed that the loss of empire was not seen as a traumatic event by the majority of British people, particularly the young (who were overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU). They are not victims of imperial nostalgia. They have plenty to worry about.

The health system is in disarray and is increasingly dependent on workers from abroad while the anti-immigration lobby is taken seriously by all politicians, left and right. Without London, the country, in terms of GDP per capita, would be poorer than Mississippi, one of the poorest American states. In the last two years there have been strikes by teachers, doctors, nurses, train drivers, airport workers, transport personnel, the Passport Office, firefighters, academics, ambulance workers, postal services, barristers, and the London Underground.

Birmingham City Council, the country’s second largest city, has filed for bankruptcy. Schools, built in a hurry with a type of concrete which is literally full of holes, are crumbling and many have been shut. In August air passengers were left stranded because of a computer fault at the country’s major airports. The police, often regarded as the ‘best in the world’, has regularly been denounced as full of racists and misogynists.

The privatisation of water turned out to be a disaster when it was discovered that the water companies disgorged polluted water in rivers. The Financial Times revealed that England was among the worst in Europe for officially designated bathing sites many of which are full of untreated sewage. Conditions in prisons are so bad that recently Germany refused to extradite to the UK a British citizen accused of drug dealing because of concerns about the overcrowding and appalling hygiene of British jails.

Rishi Sunak, himself of Indian heritage, when in India for the G20, found himself down the pecking order. Having been made to wait 24 hours he met the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a banal conference room while Joe Biden was welcomed in the grandeur of Modi’s private residence. The obvious problem, as the Financial Times put it, is that Britain has become an international joke in recent times in large part thanks to Sunak’s own Conservative party, which went through five prime ministers in six years. More than Italy! The conservative party is in disarray, widely expected to lose the next elections. Labour might win but is devoid of ideas.

One might hope that the myth of Global Britain, a successful Britain outside the EU, will give way to a more mature recognition that British exceptionalism – the assumption that we are the best, unconstrained by economic or political considerations- is quite dead.