Last week UCL Policy Lab and Hertford College, Oxford published a report entitled ‘The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs’.
The authors are distinguished and experienced former government officials including recently retired cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill and former director general at the Foreign Office Moazzam Malik.
Lord Sedwill wrote the foreword to the report in which he says: “For the past decade, we have been wrestling with our national identity, to the bewilderment of our allies and the glee of our adversaries.”
The report recommends radical recalibration of the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), as it’s officially called, to be renamed as the Department of International Affairs or Global Affairs, modelled on the approach of Australia and Canada.
The authors say the UK needs to accept its reduced role as ‘a middle rank power’ like Japan, Canada and EU countries and become ‘a team player’ in a multilateral world instead of trying to lead. “The UK has often sought to project an image of ‘greatness’ to the world that today seems anachronistic.” The UK needs to give up its claims to be a ‘global player’ or ‘world leading’.
Needless to say, the report which, among other criticisms, accuses the FCDO of being “somewhat elitist and rooted in the past”, received a pretty dusty response from that same FCDO.
However, it’s obvious the report isn’t directed at the English nationalist, nativist, empire loyalist wingnuts currently running Britain. It’s designed to offer advice to an incoming Labour government.
By a strange coincidence, right on cue, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy has written a detailed article in Foreign Affairs magazine in which he argues that a Labour government would follow a policy of ‘progressive realism’
He says that “means recognising that the UK’s success depends on hard-headed realism about our own nation and the continent’s security, not a nostalgic misremembering of what we used to be”, which curiously coincides with what Sedwill and his co-authors propose.
So, what has all that got to do with this place? Why comment on what’s going on in Britain? After all, no-one here votes for a British government of any stripe, nor has any role in devising British policy.
Resources, that’s why. This miserable, rotten, mendacious Conservative government skews resources extravagantly towards their daft, ‘nostalgic misremembering’ of imperial greatness and away from public services like health, education, transport, benefits.
For example, what was the RAF doing defending Israel against drones from Iran? Israel’s clash with Iran is none of Britain’s business, nor does it affect Britain’s security. It’s only because English (and it is English) Conservative politicians still crave to be world statesmen and Britain to be the world’s policeman that they interfere in faraway places, in quarrels among people who have nothing to do with Britain.
Usually their excuse is that they’re bootlicking the US but the US does have an interest in Israel’s clashes. Israel is America’s settler colony, with over 500,000 Americans inflicting themselves on Palestinians and regularly murdering them while staking out settlements on land they’ve stolen.
Each one of the rockets the RAF fired last weekend cost minimum $70,000, never mind the cost of flying the pathetic contingent of a couple of jets from Cyprus and tanker planes.
That’s peanuts compared to a £3 billion a year so-called ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent which is nothing of the kind since the British can’t use it without American permission.
What were the British trying to pretend in 2022 by sending their aircraft carrier towards China at a cost of over £250,000 a day? You could multiply examples ad infinitum. Self-evidently the cost of delusions of grandeur is astronomical.
This miserable, rotten, mendacious Conservative government skews resources extravagantly towards their daft, ‘nostalgic misremembering’ of imperial greatness and away from public services
Lammy says Labour wants to use foreign policy in the service of progressive goals: countering climate change, defending democracy, advancing economic growth and tackling inequality… “It is the pursuit of ideals without delusions about what is achievable”.
Let’s hope so because it’s a lot cheaper and more sensible than sending planes to bomb Afghans, Iraqis or Libyans.
Redirecting Britain’s financial commitments might even mean there’ll be some money for the north to improve health, education and benefits instead of blowing it firing missiles at people in places Britain used to loot.