The FT had an interesting piece the other day about Britain's place in the world: From Suez to Brexit and back again: Britain’s long search for a role. I confess to mixed feelings about these sorts of articles because I'm not convinced we need a "role" to play. Other mid-size countries don't go around hand wringing and worrying about their "role" so why should we? The legacy of empire is damaging us and will continue to do so until we realise we aren't the nation we once were.
The FT article, is by Philip Stephens, one of their own journalists who was on the VC10 aircraft when Margaret Thatcher went to Moscow in 1989 and apparently told Gorbachev that "Britain and the west did not want German unification" although this was never revealed at the time.
In a way, Stephens unwittingly perhaps, hits the nail on the head. We want the right to interfere wherever we want to, if we think our "interests" are threatened - and for this you know our "interests" are in interfering somewhere else in the future. He writes:
"Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, later wrote:' Nothing had entered her own life to erase vivid memories of the German past. She did not believe that Germany would subordinate itself to a process of European integration.' When Nicholas Ridley, one of her favourite ministers, remarked in an interview that the single currency plan was “a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe”, he was giving voice to her instincts. The effect was to add a new toxicity to the rising tide of hardline Euroscepticism in the Conservative party. Britain now faced not just an EU plot but the threat of a Fourth Reich."
I underlined the sentence, which Hurd wrote and Stephens quotes, apparently without irony at all. Wind the clock forward thirty years and it is Britain that is refusing to "subordinate itself" to a process of European integration, not Germany.
Stephens quotes Henry Tizard who served during the war as a special emissary between Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt, and later became chief defence scientist in Clement Attlee’s government. In the summer of 1945, he says, "Tizard saw a yawning gap between exalted ambition and diminished circumstance. Britain was behaving, he wrote in a Whitehall minute, as if it were still a great power. The world had changed."
“We are not a great power and never will be again,” wrote Tizard. “We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.”
Germany and France have accepted that they alone cannot be world powers any more and did so in the 1950s along with Italy and the other nations that made up the original six members of the EEC. The UK were quite happy for this process to take place as a way of keeping Germany in check and in the deluded belief, which Tizard and others recognised, that we were still a great power.
Mr Stephens writes of the Trident nuclear deterrent which we spend a fortune on as a way of fooling ourselves that we are still a great power. The missile system can only be used by British ministers acting alone if “supreme national interests” are at stake - otherwise, it's a NATO weapon with the Americans in charge.
Other European countries have been quite happy to see the USA and Britain to foot the bill for their defence. It suited the USA as the world's policeman and sole superpower and it suits British politicians to continue with the illusion we are a great power. Germany spent money on infrastructure and its own citizens while we frittered it away on a nuclear deterrent which is mostly for show - at least we should pray that it is.
Some in the EU recognise, with the rise of China, there is a need for Europe to defend itself and they have pushed for a common EU military force, something Britain has always resisted because it's in conflict with our dreams of greatness. Now that we are out it is not impossible to see in the next decade or so moves towards more defence spending by the EU.
In which case, we will find ourselves living in the shadow of not only a regulatory and economic powerhouse but a military superpower as well. As post Brexit Britain scrambles to find a role, the EU may perhaps finally be able to find one for itself, wouldn't that be a turn up?
Once again Britain will be wrestling with what Stephens calls the "yawning gap between exalted ambition and diminished circumstance" - but the circumstances will be far more diminished than those in 1945 when Britain might still have thought itself a world power and Europe was in ashes.
I ask myself how long Brexit can last? Not very long.
