Deciding on what the UK’s place in the world should be has been like watching politicians spin a wheel. Then spinning it again when the option they landed on doesn’t work out. First, it was the imperial power projections of Brexit, the reassertion of Britain’s place in the world unshackled by the limitations of equal partnership with Europe. You don’t hear so much about this any more (funny that). Instead, we now find ourselves in an era chastened by the embarrassing bombast of the past few years, but still trying to work out where we “fit”, what our role is, in a world where the country’s status has taken a beating.
Earlier this month, former diplomats proposed that the Foreign Office be abolished altogether and be replaced by a new Department for International Affairs. As it stands, the Foreign Office works like “a giant private office for the foreign secretary” and should be replaced by a new independent institution, one “less rooted in the past”. The new body they propose would be a more modern place. The colonial art would go, and with it, other outdated ways of working and thinking about foreign policy.
There is something in this. A department that is isolated from the rest of the civil service machinery and serves one minister is a hangover. The paintings don’t help. The whole building feels like a movie set (and is actually used as one), a cosplay of past imperial standing. And in keeping with the stubbornness of that view, and how often it is resurrected in particularly rightwing storytelling, it feels like a re-enactment of a former era. The fact that the office has not been repurposed, both in building and in style, is part of something bigger. “The British state,” the sociologist Paul Gilroy once told me, “is a machine for running and exploring the world, which doesn’t work very well when it comes to the business of the modern nation.”
So how is British foreign policy to work, now that its Brexit ambitions have been dashed? The shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, has a suggestion – “progressive realism”, which reads to me like an acceptance of Britain’s new place in the world, but with an added dash of divestment from any sort of underlying values. Or as Lammy himself puts it, “the pursuit of ideals without delusions about what is achievable”. This new progressive realism recognises that Britain still has some chips to play with. It is a permanent member of the UN security council and the world’s sixth largest economy, and “our universities, legal sectors, creatives and businesses continue to be world leaders”. These great strengths can be leveraged to make Britain a player once again, but without delusions of grandeur.
This tinkers around the far edges of the problem. It is impossible to carve out a role for Britain in the world without first reckoning with what it has become at home. The country’s colonial past is not the only thing that has been resigned to history. This modern, progressively realist nation that policymakers are trying to project into the world is also a fantasy. A nation’s foreign presence is built on the foundations of its domestic state. And after years of defunding and shrinking of the public domain, that state is a weakened and subdued one, unrecognisable in Lammy’s reaches for “optimism”.
Austerity does not only diminish practical things. It doesn’t just affect buildings, services and the amount of money those who are vulnerable have access to. Austerity takes apart the very fabric of national identity, removes the spaces in which it can be forged, and eliminates people’s dignity. Flags, the royal family, the army – all relentlessly paraded and namechecked by Conservatives and Labour as symbols of our national pride – are poor substitutes for what brings people together and gives them a sense of optimism about the future.
Even if Britain is the sixth largest economy in the world, too many people within it are browbeaten and isolated. Nearly a fifth of the population struggles with basic needs – 300,000 children were plunged into a state of absolute poverty in the past year alone. Since 2010, five-year-olds have been displaying signs of reduced growth. As Britain seeks to stand taller in the world, its children are getting shorter.
How then, are politicians and diplomats to face the world with any sense of swagger or idea of what we would like to achieve, both for our own national interests and any progressive goals globally, when a much more basic role, that of providing for your citizens, grows increasingly unfulfilled? And how to do so when the sibling of austerity, hostility to immigration, treats the world as some global recruitment pool for the jobs governments do not want to train for or spend on, and then restricts those who do come from bringing their families? Take a peek beneath the hood of our world-leading universities and business, and you will see recruitment crises, underfunding that overseas students plug (but again, without their families), and a property sector increasingly treated as a hedge fund by wealthy global investors.
The very organs of state, the ones that together should form the building blocks of the country as it represents itself abroad, are being defunded, automated, and their roles outsourced to private providers, with little promise of reform or reversal of the damage that has been done. Lammy’s own progressively realist goals of countering the climate crisis and tackling inequality are particularly hollow, given the party’s slashing of its green investment pledge and refusal to end poverty-triggering policies such as the two-child benefit cap. After Labour failed its biggest foreign policy test so far by fumbling an early question on whether Israel has the right to cut off power and water from the civilian population of Gaza, and only calling for a ceasefire under duress and amid party turmoil, Labour should again look, and start, closer to home.
And so what remains? If there is no moral standing at home, there can be none abroad, only the meaningless language of what is “achievable”, which is always a byword for what there is the will to achieve. If there is a fractured, underfunded, uncoordinated public domain, then our role in the world can only be as committed as we are domestically in creating a coherent system of peace and equality. We can remove the paintings of a triumphant Anglo-Saxon empire with an Africa represented by a black child carrying a fruit basket. And we can try to draw a line under a Conservative regime that, particularly under Boris Johnson, was pugnacious and comically out of touch.
But these are cosmetic exercises, wrapped in fancy language and good intentions. Behind them lies a truth, still revealing itself in scale and depth, about how changing the economy to the exclusion of many bedraggles the nation as a whole.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
