Ever since the war, our political class has been looking for a new role in the world. But it has been the continual failure to come to terms with new realities and a dramatically changing world order which has also shaped the way we see ourselves. So this failure becomes reflected in domestic policy.
In his speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1962, prime minister Harold Macmillan acknowledged how our world role and domestic policy were linked. He said: “How we live our lives at home depends on how we stand in the world outside.”
But there was no agreement (in fact no ideas) on what that role might be. The Conservatives looked back to empire of course, and as late as the 1980s, Alan Clark was complaining that his party’s MPs “no longer think imperially”.
Britain and Europe
Labour’s roots had been based on ideals, on socialism, but the brutalities of the Soviet Union rather undermined those ideas. Neither party ever really embraced the EU, and to many in our political class Europe was a huddle of losers, or worse. Bill Cash MP has raged in the Commons about the depredations of the Luftwaffe, and he was apoplectic when the newly elected president of the European Commission was Ursula von der Leyen, a German.
The only role we have ever seen for Britain within Europe was as its leader, naturally; though since we have no idea where we are going, it was presumptuous of us to assume they would follow us there. (It is even more presumptuous for us to continue to see ourselves as somehow the country to lead the EU, when we have just made such a pig’s breakfast of actually leaving it.)
Britain and the US
So that left us with the US. In practice, our government’s behaviour towards the US hasn’t really changed much, whether Conservative or Labour. Since 1945 it has always been the view of successive governments that, in reality, for Britain to diverge its foreign policy from America’s would be unthinkable.
In post-war euphoria, Winston Churchill coined the phrase the “special relationship”. But it has meant little in the US, and it has brought Britain no favours. In 1953, the (unlikely) Labour MP Harold Nicholson wrote in his diary that the US was:
“obliging the Greeks to get rid of our naval mission and to have an American one instead. Gradually they are ousting us out of all world authority. I mind this because I find it humiliating and insidious … they tread on traditions in a way that hurts.”
We mistook tradition for reality
Nicholson gives the game away, of course: our role in the world was reduced to nothing more than tradition. But it was our misguided attempts at tradition, of ruling the world. Quite reasonably, nobody else cared. Leading up to the war, the US had tended to see the machinations across Europe as signs of its degeneracy, including Britain and its already tottering empire. And once embroiled in warfare and ever since, much of their experience of working with this country has done little to change their minds.
The whims of a fascist
Which brings us to the present embarrassments. No British government could have anticipated that we would be tying our foreign policy to the whims of a fascist; but then we have had 80 years to confront the dilemma of outsourcing our foreign policy to another power and we have ducked it.
Keir Starmer is the unlucky prime minister who has somehow to try to maintain good relations with a US president with such infantile egocentricity and the whims of a tyrant. No doubt Starmer sees any kind of trade deal with the US as a success, since a failure would leave only the EU or a dwindling isolationism. Meanwhile in Gaza and now Iran, Britain cannot be seen to endorse a breach in international law, but excruciatingly we can neither admit to a breach in that special relationship. The government is embarrassed, the public enraged. In John le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the exposed traitor Bill Hayden in contempt describes Britain as having become “America’s streetwalkers”.
Ruled by fear
So we return to Harold Macmillan’s observation. How we live our lives at home depends on how we stand in the world outside. And the truth is that we are a scared country, and the fear begins at the top. Our leaders are scared of the world outside, scared of losing America’s favours, scared of returning to the nightmares of the EU referendum. Our loss of a world role is more acutely felt by our political class than by the people. They feel the pressure on them from outside factors almost more than developments at home. So it is not surprising that our domestic policies are a reflection of those fears, and that our democracy seems somehow to have been stolen.
Opinion polls show that the British people feel more at home with European culture and ideas than American. But it is not clear that our political class share that position, when we have sheltered under their somewhat humiliating largesse for so long. They feel the pressure.
Rachel Reeves and her wish to be an iron chancellor looks much more in keeping with the kind of hard-nosed approach expected in (and just as important, by) America than the more emollient community-focused ideas of Europe. But a continuing attempt to look hard and nobody’s push-over, only further confirms the real image we project of ourselves of a frightened little country carrying the heavy baggage of history, but without the wit or ideas to define who we want to be.
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