Homage to a Government

In a long piece heralding the government's integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy (Global Britain in a Competitive Age), Patrick Wintour in the Guardian linked Brexit and China: "Self-excluded from the European single market, the post-Brexit UK needs new trading waters in which to fish, while at the same time the rise of China requires the UK to give a more coherent response than the one offered by ministers so far". This is, ironically, much the same position as Nigel Farage has taken. For the grand old man of the gadfly right, the achievement of Brexit promotes China to the UK's number one geopolitical priority: a useful bugbear that can be linked to all manner of ills, from industrial espionage to Marxist indoctrination in universities. For an establishment man like Wintour, the advantage of the China threat is that it provides a credible substitute for the increasingly risible Russia threat, and that means a justification for cleaving to the US and more broadly supporting a "rules-based order" that can offset the destabilising impact of our departure from the European Union.

Central to this linkage is the belief of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Tony Radakin, quoted by Wintour, that "Where navies go, trade goes, and where trade goes, navies go". But this is obviously a truism only if you can't see beyond the particular history of Britain. One obvious counter to this is the success of the German and Japanese economies in the latter half of the 20th century. You could argue that this depended on the explicit protection afforded by US fleets in various oceans, but by the same token there would be no need for the UK to send more warships to patrol the South China Sea if it simply wishes to expand domestic industry through international trade. Of course a performatively belligerent stance towards China can offset a discretion on human rights abuses, which have the greater potential to disrupt that trade. Similar to Germany and Japan, the growth of Chinese exports since the 1970s has not been matched by an equivalent projection of force, despite increased defence spending (though it has remained constant as a percentage of GDP) and the noise over the Spratly Islands. Had China pursued a military expansion equivalent to the "humiliations" forced on it in the 19th century, it would have obliged the UK to cede a 100 year lease on Felixstowe by now.

Another pertinent, if more antique, comparison would be the way that Ming-era China turned its back on the military-cum-trade expeditions of Zheng He in the early-15th century. Trade continued to flourish, but it was henceforth "privatised", i.e. organised by independent merchants, as centralised court control ebbed and the priorities of commerce were no longer subservient to the system of political tribute. The common point is that trade and military projection do not have to proceed hand-in-hand, and the histories of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific in particular prove this. But it's also important to recognise that they aren't wholly independent: both in the influence one has over the other and their competing demands on the state. Spending limited financial resources on aircraft carriers patrolling the Far East means less to invest in infrastructure at home. While the potential tension between "levelling-up" and "global Britain" is obvious to some Tories (Wintour quotes Jo Johnson on this very point), others sympathetic to the government can only see optimistic overlap: "The core intersection of the Global Britain and Levelling Up agendas is their shared focus on enhancing the UK’s digital capabilities".

Clearly, Boris Johnson is not so delusional as to believe that the UK can genuinely restore its geopolitical prestige East of Suez through gunboat diplomacy. If we learnt anything from his stint as Foreign Secretary, it is that he has no grand vision and little interest in the detail. His 2016 critique of the "defeatists and retreatists" of the Wilson government was a mix of the partisan and cartoonish, and it reflects the original hyperbole in ignoring the continued British presence after 1968 in Oman, Hong Kong and Brunei (see also Philip Larkin's bitter poem, Homage to a Government, with its now ironic belief in the permanence of statues, if not empire). Commentators who interpret Johnson's rhetoric as largely pyschological compensation are simply repeating the error of many remainers over the last 5 years by reducing everything to imperial nostalgia. He really doesn't care that much. The "Indo-Pacific tilt" (which is actually minor in its military consequences) is clearly trade-led, hence the UK's application to join the CPTPP and achieve partner status with ASEAN. Sending a lone carrier group to the South China Sea is less a case of sabre-rattling than trying to crash a party with a single bottle of Buckfast. 

Science and technology is central to the review's vision, but this is little more than aspiration (and perhaps the legacy of Dominic Cummings): "By 2030, the UK will continue to lead the advanced economies of the world in green technology ... We will be recognised as a Science and Tech Superpower, remaining at least third in the world in relevant performance measures for scientific research and innovation, and having established a leading edge in critical areas such as artificial intelligence. ... The UK will be a magnet for international innovation and talent, attracting the best and brightest from overseas through our points-based immigration system. Every part of the UK will enjoy the benefits of long-term investment in research and development, education and our cultural institutions." There is no real explanation as to how this glorious future will be brought about, beyond references to historic Nobel prizes and the convenient success of the Oxford vaccine, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the UK could leverage its science and technology base further. It's just that optimism of the will isn't likely to be enough. 

The UK's persistent problem since the 1970s has been relative underinvestment in R&D, at around 1.6% of GDP (the government's current 2027 target is 2.4%), which is part of a wider decline in capital investment. This is a significant shortfall not only relative to most of the EU and the US but to the larger Far Eastern economies as well. The Chancellor's recent announcement of super-deductions for capital allowances doesn't mark a change in strategy as this is merely a short-term fix to prevent capital investment drying-up over the next two years as firms anticipate the 2023 rise in Corporation Tax. That higher rates of investment correlate with higher rates of business taxes is not something that the Tories are keen to draw attention to, preferring to emphasise their continued commitment to "competitive" and "business-friendly" taxation. Likewise, that higher wages boost investment by incentivising automation and process efficiency is not an observation to be found in the review's panegyric to science and technology. The word "wage" appears only twice in the report's 100-plus pages, and then only as an anodyne outcome.

Where the government can more justifiably be accused of delusion rather than mere avoidance is in its expectations of that other emergent global power, India; specifically in the belief that the historic relationship (where we destroyed the subscontinent's economy to create a captive market for our manufactures) provides some sort of contemporary advantage. There was a strand of Raj nostalgia among upper-class Indians up to the 1980s, but this was largely a reflection of dissatisfaction with the semi-socialist policies of the Congress Party. With the advance of the BJP and the encouragement of a more exclusivist nationalism, that has largely disappeared from the political culture. Outside of cricket, there is little sentimentality about England. Instead, there is a consensus in Delhi that the country's geopolitical presence depends on a careful cultivation of the US and a wariness towards China. The UK might be able to find common cause in this, but its support won't be considered significant and nor is it likely to count for much in trade talks (it's worth noting that India has shied away from comprehensive free trade agreements - it still hasn't agreed one with the EU).

Labour has predictably attacked the review for not being tough enough. Beyond "moar trooops", its criticism centres on the government's lack of virtue: it has failed to implement the recommendations of the Russia report, it has damaged relations with our NATO partners, and it has threatened to break international law. Her Majesty's loyal opposition has criticised arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the cutting of aid to conflict zones, but it has largely left the criticism of the proposed expansion in the nuclear arsenal to the SNP and others, in order to avoid giving the Tories ammunition to claim that the party is divided on Trident (this has generated a modicum of "elephant trap successfully avoided" praise from the usual suspects, but you sense their hearts aren't really in it). In truth, the integrated review doesn't amount to much of a change in British foreign or defence policy and that lack of fundamental change is ultimately pleasing to the Labour leadership and liberal commentators. There is no threat to Atlanticist orthodoxy and no questioning of the UK's "unique soft power" (the claim that "Those who challenge the values of open and democratic societies increasingly do so through culture" indicates that the domestic culture war will also be justified by national security - a sick joke at a time when the right of protest is being curtailed).

If there is a significance to the review it is the tonal importance ascribed to trade and the way that other elements of policy, from defence to international development, have been explicitly, if at times clumsily, linked to commercial goals. As such, Global Britain in a Competitve Age reads partly like a justification for Brexit (the EU is largely ignored) but more generally like a bought-in commercial strategy: long on aspiration and jargon, short on practicalities and coherence. At its heart is a refusal to admit that one consequence of Brexit is that guns must be sacrificed for butter: that our military capability must increasingly be turned from home defence to a symbolic presence that justifies our claim to be a global player but which would largely be useless in practice (so, no real change since Afghanistan). The parallels with the neglect of the country's pandemic preparedness and its rhetorical compensation by our "wonderful vaccine task-force" and "world-beating track and trace system", all under the rubric of an increasingly commercialised NHS, should be obvious. If the postwar era was about presenting a warfare state as a welfare state (per Edgerton), the neoliberal era saw an attempt to convert swords into ploughshares while pretending otherwise, from the Falklands to Iraq. Post-Brexit, those are now ploughshares for export, rather than domestic consumption. In reserving the right to nuke Chinese or Russian hackers at will, Johnson is merely indulging in further cakeism: obscuring the mercantilist turn in UK policy through militaristic bluster.