"World beating" Britain has fallen off the global stage

Brexit was a disaster. The Tories have turned it into a catastrophe

The prime minister, a Downing Street official said of David Cameron, thinks “the world is somewhere where you go on holiday”. Resonant perhaps of “Yes, Prime Minister”, but excruciatingly true. Rishi Sunak is still more insouciant in his disregard for global affairs. He took his family to California for a summer holiday. He is too busy to make the shorter hop to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

True, Sunak will travel this month to Delhi for a meeting of G20 nations. And, yes, other prime ministers have occasionally missed the opening of the General Assembly. But none that I can recall has been so uninterested in matters foreign. And this at a moment when the nation’s international standing could scarcely be lower. Like Boris Johnson, Sunak likes to refer to Britain as a “world beater”. But, as one of today’s Whitehall insiders puts it, he will venture out into that world “only when he has to”.

It was inevitable that leaving the European Union would damage Britain’s economic and security interests by diminishing it on the international stage. In severing ties with its neighbours, the government at once reduced its capacity to shape events on its own continent and made itself less useful to allies beyond. No-one should be surprised that the Biden White House has little to say to the present government. What price an ally that has deliberately marginalised itself in its own neighbourhood?

Less predictable was the verve with which the Conservatives have set about turning a serious act of economic self-harm into a foreign policy catastrophe. Here ideology has been stirred with incompetence and indifference. First came the threats, bluster and blatant lies of Johnson’s administration, destroying trust and credibility with former EU partners and the United States. Then the, mercifully brief, barminess of Liz Truss’s premiership. And now the myopia of Sunak’s administration.

Undoing the political damage of Brexit was never going to possible. There were some obvious strategies that might have mitigated it. Most obviously, the government could have sought a political and foreign policy cooperation agreement with the EU. Johnson ditched that idea as insufficiently purist for those committed to the spurious notion that Brexit would see Britain “take back control”. In place of solid agreements to promote the national interest came childish rhetoric about a “Global Britain”. 

Next, Downing Street could have sought to bolster the nation’s influence in other international institutions - the UN Security Council, for one. Here Johnson’s mendacious braggadocio has now given way to Sunak’s aversion to foreign travel.

Permanent membership of the Security Council comes with an important voice in international decision-making. But it also carries responsibilities and obligations. By staying away, the prime minister is saying that none of this matters. The rest of the world takes note.

There were two places where Britain could stake a half-decent claim to international leadership - climate change and international development. Britain was first to make a legal commitment to decarbonise its economy. Yet to engage with Sunak on global warming is to elicit an irritated yawn.

He turned up at last year’s climate summit in Egypt only under duress. His decision to avoid the General Assembly is said to be linked to an agenda focused on climate and development strategies that find points of unity between advanced economies and the global south. The prime minister is more comfortable at home seeking to score political points off the Labour opposition by diluting past pledges on net zero.

Hitting the UN target of allocating 0.7 per cent of national income to development assistance gave Britain real heft in shaping relationships between rich and poorer nations. As chancellor and prime minister Sunak has cut the figure to 0.5 per cent and diverted a sizeable chunk of the remaining funding to the domestic budget for asylum seekers. So much for reaching out to the emerging powers beyond Europe.

There can be no going back to a pre-Brexit world. And it may be that the shock dealt by Britain’s latest international retreat will encourage an overdue reassessment of how best to reconcile the nation’s perception of its place in the world with the harsh realities of economic decline. Leaving the EU has left Britain poorer. It will have to shape its ambitions accordingly.

All this has to start, however, with a prime minister who is interested in the world and in the sizeable contribution Britain can still make to international prosperity and security. And with a government that recognises that the “sovereignty” sought by the Tory’s party’s English nationalists is an ideological chimera. The nation has swapped the role of rule-maker in the EU for that of isolated rule-taker. Bridges with Europe urgently need rebuilding. No-one should imagine, though, the route back to international respect and influence will be easy.