We’re still a global force to be reckoned with, insists Boris
THE BBC is “infuriatingly and shamelessly anti-Brexit”, Boris Johnson said as he argued that Britain would be more “liberated on the world stage” than ever before after it leaves the EU.
The Foreign Secretary used his conference speech to take on the “gloomadon poppers” as he hailed the “vast and subtle and pervasive influence” of Britain around the world, from JK Rowling to Jeremy Clarkson.
However, he admitted that the Iraq war and the collapse of the financial markets had “badly damaged” democracy, before launching a staunch defence of Western values.
Speaking about Britain’s “soft power” on the world stage, he said that “no matter how infuriatingly and shamelessly anti-Brexit they can sometimes be” the BBC remained the “single greatest and most effective ambassador for our culture”. The BBC was repeatedly criticised by Eurosceptic MPs during the Brexit campaign for giving too much coverage to the Government’s “Project Fear” warnings.
Mr Johnson also said that over the past decade the world had got “less safe, more dangerous and more worrying”. But he said that Britain should have “no shame or embarrassment in championing our ideals around the world”. Britain, he said, needed to “speak more powerfully with our own distinctive voice”, before joking that the EU “is trying to veto the ivory ban despite having president called Donald Tusk”.
He said that “in spite of Iraq” many other military interventions by Britain had proved successful, including in Sierra Leone and Somalia.
He then highlighted Britain’s soft power: “Up the creeks and inlets of every continent on earth there go the gentle kindly gunboats of British soft power captained by Jeremy Clarkson – a prophet more honoured abroad, alas, than in his own country, or JK Rowling who is worshipped by young people in some Asian countries as a kind of divinity.”
He concluded: “in an age of anxiety and uncertainty it is surely obvious that the values of global Britain are needed more than ever. And though we can never be complacent, and though we can never take our position for granted, Churchill was right when he said that the empires of the future will be empires of the mind.
“And in expressing our values I believe that global Britain is a soft power superpower and that we can be immensely proud of what we are achieving.”
He recalled a conversation he had with Sergei Lavrov at the United Nations, during which the Russian foreign minister blamed Britain for imposing democracy on Russia in the 1990s. He said: “I was a bit startled by this, and I decided I couldn’t let it go unchallenged, and I said, ‘Hang on, Sergei, aren’t you in favour of democracy?’ And then I asked for a show of hands in the room. “You would have thought that this was a relatively uncontroversial thing – a bit like asking Maria von Trapp whether she was in favour of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. “But much to my amazement our opposite numbers just kept their hands on the table and gave us what we diplomats call the hairy eyeball and of course they felt I was winding them up; and there is a sense in which my question was semi-satirical.” In an unscripted addition to his speech, Mr Johnson said that he was “in favour of immigration” after previously questioning the Government’s target to reduce net migration to tens of thousands of people a year. A BBC spokesman said the corporation had provided “clear and impartial” information about the different sides in the referendum, “in a way that ensured that our coverage was balanced, fair and analytical across the duration of the campaign”.