A Britain Great No Longer

Between Brexit and Trump, Britain has become Great no more. At least that's how Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff from 1995 to 2007 sees it.  The worst part, according to Powell, is that his nation's decline into irrelevance has been entirely self-inflicted.


As Simon Fraser, the former Foreign Office permanent secretary, said in a speech last week: “It is hard to call to mind a major foreign policy matter on which we have had a decisive influence since the referendum.” To put it even more cruelly: we have rendered ourselves irrelevant.
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Even if we did still have influence, we don’t have any attention to spare for the rest of the world because all of our efforts are going into the destructive process of Brexit. Just as blood goes to the stomach when you have a large meal, so most of our civil servants and diplomats are working on dismantling our EU membership rather than on maximising our influence around the world, – and paradoxically we are taking on thousands more to do so in the pursuit of less bureaucracy.

We can’t even get the negotiations with the EU right, even though that is supposed to be the government’s principal objective, because cabinet ministers cannot agree on what they want the end state of our relations with the EU to be. Our interlocutors in Brussels are giving up because they have nothing to engage with. And meanwhile the Brexiters are gearing up to blame the Europeans and our own quisling civil servants.
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Britain has historically been the strong and stable democracy in Europe on which others – both the Europeans and the US – could depend. In the first world war, in the second, in the cold war and in building a liberal, free-trading and open Europe, we played a central role. We took pride, as Douglas Hurd put it, in punching above our weight. Now we have taken to punching each other in a polarised and uncertain country. Italy appears more politically stable, and France far more internationally relevant.

What puzzles our friends and erstwhile allies most is that all of this is self-inflicted. We didn’t have to give up the two pillars on which our nation has depended for so long. And we didn’t have to do so when we had nothing with which to replace them.

Oh well, perhaps Britain is retreating from the world order at an auspicious time. The fabric of our global community is fraying. Consensus is harder to forge and, even then, often brittle. Even the Dreadnought nations now sail into dangerous waters. Punching, whether above or below one's weight, becomes increasingly pointless in an era of Perma-War.