Addressing the Labour conference in October, Keir Starmer promised to lead a decade of national renewal. After Covid, Brexit and the cost of living squeeze, few will dispute the need, although people may reasonably debate what renewal implies or where the priorities should lie. This week, though, has offered a warning that renewal, desirable though it may be in principle, will also have many enemies.
“The essential first step is acknowledging you have a problem,” writes the former Foreign Office chief Simon McDonald in his recent book on the future of British foreign policy. My Observer colleague Will Hutton writes: “It is time to stop talking and thinking of Britain as a rich and broadly fair country,” in his own call for a wider national remaking. “We cannot help the world respond to the list of global problems if we ourselves are on it,” echoes the ex-cabinet secretary Mark Sedwill in a pamphlet about the Foreign Office published this week.
The majority of people seem to get this, too. Two-thirds of the nation think Britain is heading in the wrong direction, says Ipsos. Fewer than one in six disagree. That’s a huge gulf, close to record levels. The reality, clear to the majority, is that we can do so much better. Renewal is urgent. But the minority who prefer and even revere the status quo are still around. They do not accept there is a problem, or that anything very major is wrong. Or rather, they think the real problem is those who want things to change.
Some of the early responses to the Sedwill report – co-authored with the former senior officials Moazzam Malik and Tom Fletcher, among others – show this reflex at work. It certainly has its faults. God save us from their suggestion of a Foreign Office rebranded as Global Affairs UK, for instance. But the underlying reality of the pamphlet is that it is not a call for reform of the Foreign Office alone. It is a call for the renewal of British governance and, crucially, for a more balanced recognition of what Britain is as well as what it was.
To some of the Sedwill pamphlet’s rightwing critics, this is simply a power grab by the entitled liberal establishment that they blame for Britain’s misfortunes. Charles Moore, in the Daily Telegraph, foresees a department that would be more concerned with apologising for Britain’s past than with “working for British interests”. Melanie Phillips, in the Times, bemoans the report’s “mandatory self-flagellation”, its “national self-loathing” and its “talking-down of Britain’s historic identity” and sneers at its prioritisation of the climate crisis.
Few things about the pamphlet, though, have provoked the critics more than its questioning of the idea of British greatness. In a subsection that begins, “We need to build on our strengths and rely on actions rather than rhetoric,” the pamphlet says that the UK has often tried to project an image of “greatness” to the world but that this today seems anachronistic. “We should not always see ourselves as the leader in efforts to tackle global challenges,” it states. Instead, we should be “more of a team player, showing humility and respect”.
It is plain why this strikes a rightwing nerve. In July 2019, Boris Johnson ran for the Conservative leadership with a pledge to “set out a vision for Britain as the greatest place on Earth. The greatest place to be, the greatest place to live, to raise a family.” Throughout his prime ministership, and especially during the Covid pandemic, he would hymn British efforts on test and trace or on vaccines as “world-beating”.
Since Johnson’s fall from power, there has – unsurprisingly – been far less of this kind of talk. The dial has shifted back towards cooperation and alliances. But the mandarins cannot blame the greatness rhetoric on Johnson alone. It was, after all, the Foreign Office itself, then under William Hague, that in 2011 launched the “Great” Britain campaign, which branded this country’s global pre-Brexit presence with an emphasis on its “great” businesses, “great” creativity, “great” entrepreneurialism and multiple other “great” qualities. This was later relaunched in 2021 in time for Johnson’s chairing of the G7 and Cop26 conferences as the “Great” Britain and Northern Ireland campaign.
Moreover, the love affair with British greatness still lives on, and not only in the Conservative party. In 2021 the then transport secretary, Grant Shapps, promised a new public body to be called Great British Railways to replace Network Rail. A year later, Starmer launched the plan for Great British Energy, a publicly owned company to coordinate and lead a national clean energy drive.
If Labour forms the next government, Starmer will certainly face a profound task of national renewal. But national renewal and appealing to British greatness are not at all the same thing. The job of remaking will exceed the task facing any government since that of 1945. It will struggle to succeed. But it will have a far better chance if it is cast as what it is – a national effort; and not what it is not – an embodiment of greatness.
Central to national renewal will be articulating a more nuanced and inclusive sense of ourselves and of our country in place of a preposterous and exclusive one. The public seems ready for the good sense of such a change. In this rebuilding, national boastfulness will be as out of place as national self-loathing. Wallowing in assumed glory will be as inappropriate as wallowing in guilt. Occasionally I flirt with the fantasy of a new statute to rename the country as simply Britain. That’s not going to happen, but it is still true that Britain needs to get beyond the rhetoric and thinking of itself as “great” Britain. If it can, this really might be a greater place for us all.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
