We need a heavy dose of realism in British foreign and domestic policy, says Edward Pearce
The reaction of the Daily Express to the appointment of the sensible Herman van Rompuy as president of the European Union speaks for Britain. The Express message – “Belgian to lead Britain” is how I recall it – was not confined to former newspapers run by men in the filthy pictures trade. The BBC’s news channel, thin, shallow and excited as ever, regretted the top table missing the chance to be led excitingly by someone famous and British. This followed an earlier, pride-in-ignorance, reaction to Germany electing a no-account Thuringian housewife. They hadn’t heard of her either.
The bulletin lamented Europe failing to acquire someone whom an American President could decently ring up. The fact of “Yo Blair”, thus called being countable upon in every last instance to say “Yes”, seems not to have weighed. Tony Blair, as the most famous British politician about, had a debenture holder’s claim of right in Europe. Two essentials – fame and Britishness – settled things in so many challenged minds. A letter-writer to The Independent said that having been pro-European Union, he was now disgusted and contemplating a vote for the UK Independence Party. It seems that by, just belonging to the EU at all, Britain bestows a shining boon on these dubious foreigners. So if they don’t show respect and appoint the man directing British bombers against Baghdad, we should take our ball away.
The great problem of this country is the continuing delusion of being a major power. Everyone should read Rudyard Kipling. That imperialist was also a realist, warning against a national conceit rolling in exponential glory – fearful that England might be “only putty, brass and paint”. However, we don’t read Kipling. We read the absurd, unreflective 80-point island press. We celebrate Poppy Day, not for the procession of innocent men sent to the abattoir of 1914-18, but as a reassertion that: “We are a great nation.” Margaret Thatcher put it famously: “We are a lion-hearted people.” Gordon Brown is also into this strange exaltation. British greatness is a sort of “Allah Akbar” ejaculation and resorted to without verification.
So let’s look some truths in the face. We came out of the Second World War ruined, not least by the rapacity of our American creditor. In the 1950s and ’60s, we fell short of the solid economic growth of a substantial competing economy. But about the plans for a united Europe, then being put together by Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, we were lordly and remote. We couldn’t manage condescension. Sir Roger Makins, a senior Foreign Office mandarin, responded to the Schuman Plan with the British lower lip kept in curlers at night. The French had got themselves involved in another mess and we should have to get them out of it again. Herbert Morrison deplored “a challenge to the United States and the United Kingdom”. Such absurd hubris can be understood – but not excused – in the delusive mood of having survived the war. It would be sustained in the cinema long after, by Kenneth More, with cleft chin and roll-top sweater, on the quarterdeck or submarine platform, winning the war.
We didn’t win the war. Our relationship with the US has dwindled over 60 years from honorary extra in the big three to buttonhole rose. Yet we cling to America as we cling to the grand image of ourselves. We are at war in Afghanistan as we were in the murderous nonsense of Iraq because “We are Britain” – a supposed world power, friend of the US, with troops killed by the economies of a Ministry of Defence engaged beyond its means. The rotten Europeans stick in their bases, but we are a lion-hearted people. As a nation, we have come to resemble a character in HG Wells, Arnold Bennett or the early novels of George Orwell – shabby-genteel, keeping up appearances. Sterling, not a mere currency but a mystic symbol, too heroic for contamination by the dud and alien euro, slips toward the humiliation of parity. We cannot afford the euro.
So what is to be done? Kipling again: “We have had no end of a lesson. It will do us no end of good.” We must recognise that this modest, underperforming country, which banked on banking and lost, should cut its cloth smaller and seek Scandinavian status. The lion-hearted people bang on about Churchill. No one in Sweden yearns for Charles XII, who was also a lion. The small countries of Europe are exemplary. Holland and the Belgians, whom we compulsively insult, came out of occupation and took 12 years to make up the core of Europe with Germany and France. They get along with the US, but not as a function of being the captain’s best friend. They lack both yearning retrospect and leftover presumption.
Our requirement, then, is medium-sized: to retreat from all military adventures, send no troops overseas except for natural disasters and reduce military spending all round. We achieve polite divorce from the US, a foreign country with dangerous habits. We cancel Trident and bow out of nuclear weapons (and bases). We think gross domestic policy and a sound exporting economy. Foreign policy becomes a matter of opinion only. But
candid criticism of American and Israeli delinquencies should be made, the next Gaza massacre denounced in appropriate terms. We have no place in the “war on terror”. Government should be supremely concerned about its citizens and think pensions, railways and hospitals, to be paid for through exported goods and services, anything honest and wholesome.
Grandeur has done nothing for us and prideless attachment to a genuine great power whose enemies have become our enemies has achieved the same. There are no railway bombs in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway – or Belgium. There was one in Spain only in delayed reaction to José Maria Aznar’s government’s pitch at servile Atlanticism. We have followed the sin of pride and paid heavily for it. Now is the time for Britain to follow the thinking of another bloody foreigner, François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire. We should cultivate our garden.
