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HMS Queen Elizabeth departs from Portsmouth on March 1 for sea trials in preparation of her first active deployment - Credit: Getty Images
As the pride of the British fleet prepares to sail to the South China Seas, MARK MARDELL offers a timely analysis of what 'Global Britain' might actually mean.
There’s little that says ‘Global Britain’ so well as traveling halfway around the world to deliver the message “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”
The Royal Navy’s latest pride and joy, the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, will soon journey 20,000 miles, straight into the world’s most febrile flash point, the disputed waters of the South China Seas.
The prime minister declares it “the most ambitious deployment for two decades”. When Gavin Williamson was still defence secretary he predicted the trip would project “hard power” and enhance Britain’s “reach and lethality”.
The new fleet flagship will be at the heart of a multi-national carrier strike force surrounded by “a ring of steel’ from the US Navy. The Americans too will supply some of the war planes on its decks – the F-35s of the Marine Fighter Attack Squadron, the ‘Wake Island Avengers’. According to its makers, the jet is the “most lethal, survivable and connected fighter aircraft in the world”.
Whether you are by now salivating at the thought of all this gleaming hardware ploughing through the sparkling Pacific seas, quaking with fear at the possibility of a confrontation with the world’s rising superpower or simply falling about laughing over civilian boy politicians’ love of toys, is a matter of politics and temperament.
But it is no accident it is happening now. As the head of the Royal Navy, First Sea Lord, Admiral Tony Radakin says the exercise is “very much the floating embodiment of Global Britain”.
What else is bobbing about on the waves in Brexit’s wake has been unveiled in this week’s long-awaited, somewhat delayed, foreign policy review, ‘Global Britain’ which declares the UK is “uniquely international in its outlook and interests”.
Coined in 1997 as the name of an anti-EU pressure group, ‘Global Britain’ could be seen as a brand attempting to hogtie imperial nostalgia to a future role for the country via a revitalised trans-Atlantic alliance. There’s an odd mix of pretty clear-sighted analysis of the world’s greatest problems and Britain’s strengths and a very Borisish, boosterish attempt to dash pessimism about the Western alliance and the UK’s place in the world.
Central is the idea that Britain is a “Force for Good”. Tellingly those are Downing Street’s capitals, not mine. All of a piece then, with the prime minister’s image of our country as Clark Kent, entering a phone booth (sadly, not a red phone box) ripping off his glasses and emerging in flowing cape as Superman, if still something short of a superpower.
This is all very well. But it is all rather thrown into question by the prime minister’s distinct aversion to conceding that sometimes Britain may have been a Force for Bad, or even has a Distinctly Mixed Legacy. This isn’t about breast beating – it matters because if Good is defined as anything your country does, especially when linked to Force, then you don’t really know what Bad is either.
The prime minister told the Commons on Tuesday that the review rejects the “cramped horizons” of a regional foreign policy in favour of a “tilt to the Indo-Pacific”.
Other ideas have already been trailed heavily in previous speeches.
He is to be applauded for using the bully pulpit of the UN last month to deliver a lecture on the hard, practical virtues of tackling climate change, even if he did feel the need to cover his right flank with a declaration that this isn’t about giving in to the whims of “a bunch of tree-hugging tofu munchers”.
Top marks too for suggesting that the world should prepare for the next pandemics and show unity and generosity in dealing with this one. No need to mutter anything about getting it right the first time.
But that Force in the “Force for Good” is central. ‘Global Britain’ is after all a “foreign policy, defence, security and international development review”. Our history does place a premium on military power – maybe not every problem is a nail, but our politicians still lust after the huge hammers of yore. And if you are not too bothered about where all that “lethality” might lead it does make sense to play to existing strengths.
Once at a British embassy party in Washington a diplomat told me “if you want to know about the ‘special relationship’ look around you”. He meant all those bemedaled men and women in uniforms, clutching their glasses of white wine and miniature fish ’n chips, were at the heart of it. It may be a misplaced British conceit that the US values our military and intelligence cooperation so highly, but it is a perception that drives policy at the highest level. The UK is increasing its defence spending by £24 billion and revelling in the development of sexier ways of killing people, such as AI, bigger drones and laser weapons, not to mention all those extra nukes.
But in Boris’ vision sea power is a vital symbol.
It was no accident that the prime minister, a little over a year ago, gave his first post-Brexit foreign policy speech in Greenwich, home of the Cutty Sark, in the Painted Hall of the Old Naval College, declaring “above and around us you can see the anchors, cables, rudders, sails, oars, ensigns, powder barrels, sextants, the compasses and the grappling irons”.
Then, his point was the UK would emerge as a defender of free trade in a Trumpian world of tariff wars, suffering the first Covid blows to open borders.
More recently the First Sea Lord put the case for his service being the future, not the past. “The threats that we face, the relentless growth of commercial shipping volumes, climate change opening up new trade routes, the need to influence, protect our values and where necessary compete, all of these once again are focused on the world’s oceans.”
