Global pandemics, climate change, the rise of China, cyber-threats and populist politics have combined to upend traditional assumptions and alliances. These are stormy times and Britain is yet to find a place in them. We stand outside the European project for the first time in half a century without a clear idea where we are heading. The government talks in vague terms of new partnerships, reversing retreat and acting as a force for good in the world, but for all the talk, Covid-19 has revealed a fragile country. Lacking security and ambition at home, we are also adrift abroad.
The long-awaited Global Britain strategy, published last month, should have addressed this, putting flesh on the bones of that two-word slogan. Instead, riddled with inconsistencies and silent on the deep discontent across Britain, it revealed a government unaware of how deeply these two great challenges facing Britain—the global and the local—are intertwined, tackled only together or not at all.
Only a self-confident country at ease with itself, that knows what it stands for and can deliver on its values at home, will be able to summon the convictions and coalitions to stand for them abroad. That is why foreign policy starts at home. It should be anchored in the towns where it is already painfully evident that whatever foreign policy we have been running of late has failed to protect the things that matter to people, and left them reeling in a world that feels like it’s spinning out of control.
That sense is felt keenly in all the communities where frequent floods cause devastation for families and business owners, and among football fans who face the collapse of their local club after it has been thrown away by gamblers on the other side of the world. It is there among the steel workers facing unemployment because of get-rich-quick schemers whose global bubble eventually burst, and on those factory floors where unions go unrecognised, dignity is denied and wages are too low to live on.
Genuine internationalism, as CLR James once wrote, must be based on the national scene. It is no wonder, then, that an approach to foreign policy that failed to protect the security of working people in Britain and across the world has led us here. After a series of choices over recent decades that caused devastation for many communities at home, writing off people and places across the UK, the British people have become deeply wary about lending support to myriad forms action and engagement overseas. This loss of trust holds back Britain’s ability to make positive and lasting change in the world.
This is how we built the road to here: adrift abroad with little idea of where we are heading, stuck in a needlessly confrontational cycle with our nearest neighbours in Europe and without any vision to guide our post-Brexit path. The alternative is billed as an “Indo-Pacific tilt” but it feels like more like a lurch towards the region for lack of an anchor closer to home.
Without the values to light a clear path, the British government has become an unreliable and inconsistent partner. It trumpets international law but then repeatedly and openly breaks it; seeks peace in Yemen while selling arms to Saudi Arabia; promises to protect the armed forces only to cut them; talks of being a force for good in the world while slashing aid to the most vulnerable; identifies Russia as the top security threat while allowing the City of London to remain a haven for the dirty money that sustains it.
Island of insecurity
Our current position is the product of an age of insecurity that stretches right back to the uncritical embrace of economic globalisation in the 1980s—a model that handed so much power to capital that by the late 1990s it had convinced a Labour government that this model of globalisation was not a choice but a fate.
This is how places like Jackson, Kentucky, made memorable to millions through JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, came to be stripped of their vitality, their purpose, their inheritance—seen no longer as contributors, but as the problem itself. Like my own town in Lancashire, known globally for George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, wages were deemed too high and their demands too many. Instead work was transferred to countries where this “problem” was removed and, as Jon Cruddas highlights, the dignity of labour became a private not political concern, with questions of ethics “handed to the market to decide.”
But at least the last Labour government used investment at home to cushion the fall-out of the globalisation it accepted as a given—but the later Conservative-led governments instead supercharged the effects, combining a laissez-faire global policy with austerity. Instead of seeking to solve discontent, this government has latterly taken to weaponising it, dividing and weakening us from one another, and tugging at what Orwell called the invisible chain that binds the four nations of the UK together.
The grubby details emerging from the Greensill Capital affair, the lobbying scandal currently embroiling David Cameron, encapsulate where we are. This is a system which allows the chosen few with unparalleled access to power to milk it until it breaks, taking risks safe in the knowledge that if they win, they win big, but if they lose it is never them, but people in towns like Rotherham and Hartlepool who shoulder the appalling losses. Taxes are dodged and money leaks overseas, stripping communities of resilient public services, investment in their young peoples’ skills, and infrastructure, such as broadband and transport. Absent these things—the foundation stones of modern prosperity—a downward spiral takes hold. That is what happened in many places, and it eventually unleashed political turbulence across the West. In 2016, a third of a century after they were abandoned to the headwinds of globalisation, people in those communities on both sides of the Atlantic delivered their verdict on the laissez-faire attitude shown to them by their governments. We entered an era that erased nuance, embraced division, wrecked debate and often disdained due process, reminding us what a fragile thing democracy always is.
Out of the ordinary
For all the division of recent years there remains a consensus in every corner of the UK that we can and should play a role in shaping the world beyond our shores. That is the floor from which to build an agenda for Britain that matches the ambition of the people in it—big and generous, not small and petty—measured not in the number of our flags but in the health of our children, the strength of our communities, the dignity of our workforce and the security of our nation.
The next Labour government’s approach to foreign policy will start with the national security that is the first priority of any responsible government, and the economic and environmental security that people across the UK have been denied for too long. We will invest in the alliances to achieve it, and never allow foreign policy to be treated as a plaything in grand-standing debates, divorced from the everyday lives of people in Britain.
Our commitment to Nato and our armed forces remains unshakeable, but we will also work to counter new threats at home from cyber-attacks to disinformation, and bolster our power as an exemplar by strengthening the integrity of our own democracy. We will treat climate change both as a direct threat to the security of the planet, and as an imminent threat to the lives and prosperity of working-class people in this country and the wider world. Modern socialists must see climate change as a central pursuit of social justice, not an optional extra. We will accelerate efforts to make essential progress in the decisive decade ahead, and seek fairness in how it is achieved.
Last but not least, we will reset the approach of the last 40 years and take long overdue domestic and international action to rebuild the economic security of Britain’s people and the places they call home. Instead of tinkering at the edges—moving an eye-catching but tiny handful of jobs from London to the regions—we should have a plan to revive the places that were once the engine of the world—and could be again.
We will train an unsparing eye on the consequences of the economic model, dominated by exports from China, which has driven down working standards, wages and trade practices in the pursuit of growth. Our relationship with China is more important to the factory operative earning £8.72 an hour than any domestic scheme for industrial grants.
What’s needed, then, is a new economic statecraft to help bridge the divide between the global and the local. A trade policy that meets the needs of the whole country: raising standards, championing labour rights from Bolton to Bangalore, protecting the environment and prioritising fairness alongside market access. We will bear down on tax havens, close tax loopholes and ensure that no UK jurisdiction is a soft touch for corrupt elites looking to hide their assets. We will build new alliances of like-minded governments and trade unions to defend working people the world over from the race to the bottom, and level the playing field for those incredible bricks-and-mortar businesses who are rooted in our communities. We will not seek populist, protectionist answers to a globalised world, but nor will we cling to the outdated belief, that flies in the face of evidence from Xinjiang, that free trade automatically creates political liberty, whether here or overseas.
Hearing the roar
As we set aside the old dogmas and look to the future, we will turn first to our neighbours in Europe and seek new points of connection, recognising that bilateral relations with European countries are enhanced by a constructive relationship with the EU itself. They must respect the UK’s decision to stand outside the EU just as we will respect the importance of the European project to our friends and neighbours. From sanctions and trade to financial regulation and climate change, from the G7 to COP26, the EU is an important partner.
In the US, President Biden has pledged to lead “not by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” and his Treasury Secretary departs from the old Washington consensus on tax competition and a race to the bottom to seek a new global consensus about fair tax rates on business. We will seek a partnership, including on the clean energy technology that can create jobs in the communities that once powered the world with fossil fuels, and can now do so again in new ways. We will partner with allies further afield to defend threats to international law, democracy and human rights, rebuild our reputation and influence across the Commonwealth and restore that leadership in international development, which the Johnson administration’s cuts and blurring of missions has so recently trashed. We will build new ties in Africa, based on relationships of respectful equals on the world stage. We will lay the foundations for a new diplomatic, security and trading relationship, to tackle climate change and disease, drive opportunity and deliver real progress for millions still living in poverty.
Our moral compass will navigate us towards strong alliances across the world, acting as a reliable partner that knows, as Abraham Lincoln said, that “the world is complex and interlinked but important principles may and must be inflexible.” And no principle is more important than that enunciated by Ernest Bevin when he said that “the only repository of faith I have been able to find… is the common people.” It is from them that power is derived, and to them it must return. Never again will we allow the needs of people to be an afterthought with foreign policy discussions taking place in closed rooms without reference to those most deeply affected. We will start a new national conversation about our place in the world and the sort of country we want to be, grounded in all our nations and communities, drawing on the many great organisations, movements and institutions who lift their eyes beyond their own horizons to consider the renewed nation and the better world that we can build.
That is what our patriotism looks like: not a swaggering nationalism on the world stage, but a determination to listen—really listen—to the communities we serve closer to home. Had we only done so we would have heard “the roar,” as George Eliot put it, that “lies on the other side of silence.” Across the world, slowly, progressive politics is starting to respond to its call, seeking solutions where our opponents seek only strife, and creating durable floodlights along the path to a brighter tomorrow, when for so long we have had only occasional fireworks that allow us a brief glimpse of a better future. That future has been a long time coming for so many people at home and abroad who, for decades, have longed to see hope flickering back to life. They have waited long enough.
