Sun is setting on Britain’s delusional image
While the former world power likes to pretend it’s still important in world affairs, the truth is that it really doesn’t matter much to anyone
Britain’s constant boast that it punches above its weight internationally rings more hollow by the day.
Whatever happened to Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia?” Harper’s magazine summed it up with a front- page headline last year that screamed “Broken Britain,” a catchy phrase borrowed from the British tabloid, the Sun. Others recently have dubbed the country the equally unkind “Angry Britain.”
It is one of life’s abiding mysteries why some American presidents pretend that Britain matters. “Once Great Britain” has been faltering for years and yet British foreign secretaries, with the help of the BBC, which is obliged to provide them with a soap box, remain self- important on the world stage.
Britain’s national railway grid, the first and for so long the best in the world, has been deteriorating for more than half a century. Although perhaps not as much as they did 20 or 30 years ago, workers still go on wildcat strikes, making a mess for visitors to a country that has become hugely dependent on tourism.
The economy, such as it is, relies too much on diminishing oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and from the profits still generated by banks and investment firms in the City — London’s financial district. But Britain’s big lead in international banking is beginning to erode because of competition from the United Arab Emirates and from the Far East.
Like Canadians of a certain age, I grew up in a Dominion where children sang God Save the Queen every morning in classrooms where maps were still mostly imperial pink. Teachers fed us a steady diet of stories about British royalty and conquerors and adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake, Gen. James Wolfe, Capt. James Cook, Vice- Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, Cecil Rhodes, T. E. Lawrence ( of Arabia) and Sir Winston Churchill.
As a consequence, I was shocked when I first took a train into central London more than 40 years ago. Large swaths of the city were still as scruffy as sketched by Dickens and Orwell. Many Britons looked malnourished, even sickly. The plumbing and heating were ( and still are) an abominable patchwork. The Tube was ( and still is) unreliable, uncomfortable and far too expensive — like almost everything else in the country — for the wretched quality of service provided.
The most conspicuous traces of empire then ( and now) were the annual pomp and circumstance of the Proms at Royal Albert Hall, the grand military parades on the Mall and hints of former glories evoked by the Marble Arch, Nelson’s Column and Cleopatra’s Needle. Like those relics, much of what is grand in Britain today is ancient and frayed: drafty castles and country estates; Hadrian’s Wall; museums, which display generations of imperial plunder; and the hardscrabble slums of south and east London, the West Midlands, Glasgow and Northern Ireland.
The miseries of such places seldom touch Canadian visitors to the United Kingdom because so few of them venture much beyond a comfort that extends not much further than Hyde Park and Buckingham Palace in the west, to St. Paul’s Cathedral in the east and from the south bank of the Thames, to Regent’s Park in the north — an area no larger than a few kilometres by a few kilometres.
Even the British pub is no longer venerable. Thousands of them have been shuttered. Most of the survivors are bland franchises.
The English soccer team has long been an international joke only partly made up for by the excitement created by the foreign stars that populate the Premier League.
Further British sporting disappointments can be expected at this summer’s Olympic Games.
What Britain clearly still has going for it is a vibrant theatre and literary scene, a few top schools, that battered but still often brilliant national treasure, the BBC, and the lucre generated by the breathless hype that envelops the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William and his duchess, Kate Middleton.
But those who admire or fixate on all this ignore or are unaware of the darker realities lurking elsewhere.
Britain’s constant boast that it punches above its weight internationally rings more hollow by the day. The defence ministry is eviscerating the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force and making deep cuts to the army, too.
There have been sweeping redundancies across all three services, the sudden retirement of the fleet of Harrier jump jets, the premature retirement of the aircraft carrier Ark Royal and the likely immediate sale to raise cash of one of two carriers now being built. Even after the current round of Draconian cuts, it is difficult to see how Britain can sustain the force that will remain, let alone underwrite plans for a new generation of nuclear submarines, new frigates and the new F- 35 Joint Strike Fighter.
That Britain can no longer even pretend to be a major global player was already obvious to its troops and allies in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Well- trained, brave soldiers from fabled regiments went into battle under- equipped because the British treasury no longer has enough money to pay for the kit required for expeditionary escapades.
While, for example, Ottawa gave Canadian troops in Kandahar whatever they urgently required, from boots to stateofthe- art command posts, helicopters and safer armoured vehicles, British troops often have had to make do with gear that sometimes looked as if it had seen service against Rommel’s Afrika Korps — and in a few cases, may have been used in that war.
Much has been made lately of Britain’s decision to opt out of a new European financial treaty that tried to rescue the continental economies because the other EU states refused to grant London’s financial institutions special status.
Britons of “the wogs start at Calais” school celebrated Prime Minister David Cameron’s intransigence as they did earlier British decisions to keep the pound instead of the euro and to maintain a totally separate set of immigration and customs checks than their neighbours across the English Channel. The almost universal European response to Downing Street’s latest act of isolationism was to say “good riddance.”
Britain’s AAA credit rating is hanging by a thread. The pound is weak. The infrastructure is decrepit. Ugly riots in several British cities last summer made plain deep racial and economic divisions. Chronic youth unemployment and under- employment have created a spectre of perpetual gloom.
Nevertheless, Britain has had a marvellous run, prolonged by decades by its own delusions of grandeur and fuelled in part, by a flood of dirty money from Arab sheikdoms and Russian and African warlords and gangsters.
The sun still shines on the Union Jack in any few distant archipelagos, but the outlook for the Mother Country is bleak.