Until recently it used to be said – mainly by the smugger mandarins of the Foreign Office – that we Brits “punched above our weight”. The idea this self-regarding phrase was meant to convey was that we were so tremendously clever at the arts of diplomacy that more attention was paid to us than our diminished economic and military strength would otherwise warrant.
In reality, of course, that “influence” was confined to the United States of America and it mostly amounted to us saying “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” to whoever happened to be occupying the White House. There have been exceptions – most notably Clement Attlee flying to Washington to urge President Harry S Truman not to use the atom bomb on the Chinese in Korea, and Harold Wilson resolutely rejecting President Lyndon Johnson’s demand that we send at least a token contingent of troops to Vietnam.
But in general our role in the “special relationship” has been that of a trusted yes man, culminating in Tony Blair’s decision to join in George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq – arguably our greatest foreign policy error since Munich. Anyone can have a special relationship if they are prepared to adopt the status and posture of a shoeshine boy.
However, outside the English speaking world, our close attachment to the Americans has done us a great deal of harm and very little good. Throughout the Muslim world, we are seen as a prime mover in what they regard as a war against Islam. In the eyes of many of them, we are even worse than the Americans because of our colonial record in south-east Asia, the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East.
But our quest to punch above our weight begs a number of much larger questions, all of which have come into particularly sharp focus in the present row over our troops in Afghanistan. The sharpest and most immediate of these is whether British soldiers are losing their lives because they haven’t got enough helicopters to fly them above the heads of their adversaries.
I am not a military expert, but I would have thought it was simple common sense that you can’t be blown up by a roadside bomb if you aren’t driving along the road where it has been planted. So Gordon Brown’s “flat Earth” protestations that our boys have everything they need were already patent nonsense, even before the chiefs of staff went spectacularly public with their complaints.
A more complex and more important question relates to the purpose of all this punching, whether above our weight or not. We need to ask who we want to punch and why. Alas, the answer seems to be that we have been punching anyone the Americans asked us to punch. At least when we previously invaded Afghanistan – with such catastrophic consequences that we lost an entire army – we did so to protect our vast and lucrative Indian empire. This time, it seems to be in support of America’s war on al Qaida.
In these circumstances, it seems to me that our American masters ought to treat us as the mercenaries we really are and supply the weaponry we need to carry out our demeaning function. If our little army is just an adjunct of the US military, then our men are entitled to have the same gear as their American comrades – and at American expense.
But clearly it would be much better if we stopped punching altogether, whether on behalf of the Americans or on our own account. Then we would be able to look at some even larger questions, such as the future replacement of the Trident nuclear “deterrent” and whether we really need two gigantic aircraft carriers which promise to be far bigger than anything we had in the Second World War.
If they go ahead, these two projects would be grotesque manifestations of the “punching above our weight” fantasy – even if they were being proposed by a Tory government at the top of a financial boom. But this is a Labour administration and we are not in a boom. We are in the middle of an unprecedented economic crisis. Whoever wins the next general election, there are going to be either spending cuts or tax increases or, most likely, a combination of both in the next few years.
Yet incredibly, Peter Mandelson chose this week to tell Sky television that there were going to be no cuts whatever in the defence budget – which presumably means that the Trident replacement programme and the building of the two carriers will go ahead, just as if there were no economic crisis.
Goodness knows what gives Lord Mandelson the authority to say such things; he isn’t Defence Secretary and he isn’t Chancellor – or not yet, anyway.
The purpose seemed to be to contrast Labour’s patriotism with Tory pusillanimity. David Cameron, Mandelson claimed, had not ring-fenced defence spending.
So there you are: the Labour Party is preparing to go into the next election with a spending programme aimed at the retired colonel vote. “Gad sir”, as Colonel Blimp might have said to Richard Littlejohn, “you couldn’t make it up”.
