Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Government won 319-308 which is a dreadful result for a government with a 70-80 seat majority. 33 Tory rebels including IDS, Tom Tugendhat, David Davis, Tobias Ellwood and others.

Interestingly this won't be the only fight because there's a similar amendment in the Financial Services Bill (with sponsors from all the parties - including Jeremy Hunt).

I think the government has a bit of a point on this just in terms of where responsibility lies between courts, government and parliament and whether it's legally particularly effective (https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-proposed-genocide-amendment-to-the-uk-trade-bill-paper-tiger-or-self-inflicted-wound/). But a very close call for the government.

Incidentally interesting piece on John Bew - the man working on Britain's defence and foreign policy strategy post-Brexit (also noteworthy there is a centrist/liberal strategy proposed by Chatham House and a right-wing/Tory strategy more in Policy Exchange etc - I haven't yet seen any thinking about this on the left which is disappointing):

The man who knows what 'Global Britain' means
The UK must remake its path in the world post Brexit — John Bew is charting the way.
By Charlie Cooper
January 14, 2021 4:07 pm

LONDON — Are we about to find out what "Global Britain" actually means?

Within the next few weeks, Boris Johnson's government is due to publish potentially its most important policy document of the post-Brexit era and the culmination of a year's work behind the scenes in Whitehall: "The integrated review of security, defense, development and foreign policy."

The title is a mouthful but the purpose is simple: to define the U.K.'s role in the world for the coming decade and beyond.

Unusually, the man chosen by Johnson to lead the review is not a career civil servant, diplomat or ex-politician: he's a historian, the 40-year-old biographer of British statesmen and expert in realpolitik, John Bew.

A director of Kings College London's portentously named "Centre for Grand Strategy," Bew was picked by Johnson for his ability to see the bigger picture. With the U.K. embarking on its post-EU future at a fundamentally unstable moment in global politics — the decline of the U.S., China's increasing potency, climate crisis, post-pandemic recovery, rapid technological change — that could yet prove a shrewd move.

"There is a lot of cynicism about the idea of Global Britain in some foreign capitals," said David Lidington, chair of the RUSI think tank and a former Cabinet minister who served as Theresa May's de facto deputy (and a historian himself). "It is seen at the moment as a slogan without substance. One of the big challenges for John Bew — and even more for the prime minister — is to demonstrate that there is both intellectual and practical substance to Global Britain."

Grand strategy

When the integrated review is published (officials said it was mostly complete) it will be the work of many hands, not Bew's alone. But as the prime minister's foreign policy adviser he has, through his small team in No. 10, played the central "synthesizing" role, as one official put it, bringing together the review's several elements from across Whitehall — chiefly defense, diplomacy, trade and aid — into a single, coherent strategy. At least, that's the idea.

Peter Ricketts, a former national security advisor and often a critic of the prime minister, nonetheless considers Bew "an inspired choice" for the job. "He brings a scholar's, academic's mind, but he is also a very pragmatic person as well," Ricketts said, speaking to POLITICO in the fall.

One of the precedents for such an all-encompassing U.K. strategy document is the 1960 "Future Policy Study," an eight-month project by senior officials and military commanders that fed into to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's so-called Grand Design (a plan which, perhaps ironically, placed accession to the European Economic Community at the center of British foreign policy priorities).

Too often since then, in Bew's own view, British strategic thinking has been next to nonexistent. In 2013, writing in the New Statesman, he lambasted David Cameron's government over its "swingeing defence cuts" and failure to "understand the nature of the world in which we operate." He noted the elevation of Philip Hammond to the post of foreign secretary in 2014 as the "triumph of the tinkerer over the thinker. He brings with him no clear philosophy of Britain's place in the world, nor any proven depth of interest in foreign affairs." (In Bew's extensive writing on the aftermath of the Brexit vote, he never makes explicit whether he backed or opposed the U.K.'s biggest strategic shift of recent years: leaving the EU.)

Though the details of this new "grand design" are still to be seen, some of the headline themes are already clear. Bew — a realist who literally wrote the book on realpolitik — is nonetheless (like Johnson) a believer in the U.K. as a force for good in the world, and the review will reflect this.

"For the last 300 years every time the world has been in flux there has been a British voice and very often a British fist or pen on the table controling the next turn of the wheel," said one person familiar with Bew's strategic approach. "This could be the first time in 300 years that's not true. Will we be a hegemonic power like China or America? No. But if we invest properly can we be the convener of, say, the next 10 largest powers?"

One of the biggest outcomes of the review is already out in the open: the announcement of a £6.5 billion real-terms defense spending increase over the next four years.

The plan, which includes significant investment in artificial intelligence technology and cyber capabilities, keeps the U.K. as the biggest defense spender in Europe and comfortably above the NATO defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP. With half an eye on Joe Biden's aim to renew the democratic alliance system, a renewed emphasis on support for NATO is also on the U.K. agenda, officials said, as is an expansion of the G7 group (of which the U.K. holds the presidency this year) to a "D10" of democratic powers (G7 plus India, Australia and South Korea).

An outline of the U.K.'s approach to China and regional policy in Asia is also expected in the review. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has already spoken of a "tilt to the Indo-Pacific" involving a push for the U.K. to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) trade group while increasing the U.K.'s military presence in the region.

On China, the document is expected to outline the centrality of human rights concerns in the U.K.'s stance toward the autocratic powers, one official said; something already in evidence in the U.K.'s clash with Beijing over the new Hong Kong security law and the detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.   

Another key question is how the review positions the U.K. in relation to the U.S. and Europe. Macmillan's Future Policy Study set out "one basic rule for British policy ... we must never allow ourselves to be put in a position where we have to make a final choice between the United States and Europe." That's a principle that may still apply.

The final conclusion of the Brexit talks in December, said the senior official, had allowed U.K. relations with European powers to focus on the "hard facts" of the U.K.'s usefulness as a defense ally, rather than the economic tug of war over trade rules with the EU. London, outside of the EU tent, would also attempt to be more nimble in terms of how it aligns in pursuit of foreign policy goals.

"We will side with the E3 [France and Germany] when we think it is right but tilt to Five Eyes [U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand] cooperation when we think it is necessary," said the senior official.

History boy

The decision to bring in a historian to lead such an important government strategic task is an "unusual" one in the British context, said Brendan Simms, professor of the history of international relations at the University of Cambridge, who taught Bew European history.

However, it would be far from remarkable in the U.S., where cross-pollination between the worlds of academia and government is much more common. Bew's own close ties to Washington's foreign policy community (in 2013 he became the youngest ever person to hold the distinguished "Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy" research post at the U.S. Library of Congress) have helped Johnson's No. 10 make early links with Joe Biden's incoming foreign policy team, officials said.

"He was an excellent student: precise, insightful and possessed of an instinctive understanding of political process," said Simms. "He will bring to the [integrated review] a sense that what is, does not always have to be — and some much-needed historical depth and perspective."

After the EU referendum in 2016, Bew worked with both the right-leaning think tank Policy Exchange and the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, contributing to several reports on how the U.K. should position itself post Brexit, including a paper for the think tank called "Making Global Britain Work," which contains plenty of clues as to the direction of the integrated review.

Born in Belfast and the son of two eminent historians, Paul Bew and Greta Jones, Bew the younger played a key advisory role to Johnson in the phase of Brexit negotiations leading to the Withdrawal Agreement. He was particularly influential in the talks between the U.K. prime minister and his and Irish counterpart Leo Varadkar that helped clear roadblocks to a deal that would avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, said a third U.K. official.

Bew proved his effectiveness in those first six months of Johnson's premiership, the official said. "People forget about where we got to in terms of the Varadkar-PM summit. A lot of that came down to Bew. There's an innate trust [between him and the prime minister]" the official added.

A biographer of post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee who before entering government was a regular columnist in the left-leaning New Statesman, Bew might not seem a natural choice of adviser for a Conservative prime minister, let alone one who has arguably been the most divisive since Thatcher.

"If anything, I would say he's a Labour voter. But old Labour. National Labour," said one friend of Bew's. "Not terribly left-wing Labour. He believes in British influence. But he is not tribal."

When considering whether or not to put his academic career on hold and go and work for Boris Johnson, Bew's decision boiled down to a sense of duty and a desire to turn theory into practice, the friend said. "If you've written about prime ministers, don't you want to be in No. 10? To see what it's really like?

"If you've written about history, don't you want to make it?"

His biography of Clem Attlee is very good

[Tamas]

Life can't be all sunshine and glory at the border crossings yet, couple of my work projects are suffering for deliveries being stuck there and way late.

[Syt]

I'm still waiting for a book I ordered from the UK before New Year's, projected arrival: February (yes, it's been sent, weeks ago). 

[Sheilbh]

I've not had any mail for weeks. Apparently this is due to covid issues meaning there's no Royal Mail deliveries in my area (and they have an enormous backlog) not Brexit - but who knows.

[garbon]

We still get them here but much delayed. Last week I had three letters come from my mother on the same day.

[Tamas]

London sucks. Mail has been quite alright so far, with maybe one exception perhaps.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting - May decides to launch a pretty strong attack on Johnson in the Mail



It's very rare for former PMs to launch this type of attack - especially against your immediate predecessor. And the Mail is an interesting choice. I do sort of feel Johnson might be in for an uncomfortable spring - especially once the vaccine's been largely rolled out. It'd be very easy to dump him and blame any Brexit issues plus covid on him.

Edit: And I would note the Mail strikes me as the paper that will turn on Johnson quickest. He's a bit too louche for them with his indeterminate number of children and they weren't massive fans of Cameron's Etonian chummocracy either. They're rather more Captain Mainwaring in style and tone.

[Iormlund]

I'm still waiting for a book I ordered from the UK before New Year's, projected arrival: February (yes, it's been sent, weeks ago). 

I'm waiting for some more GW plastic crack. 

[The Brain]

Congrats on having the most laughable leader of a major western country!

[Threviel]

This is the first time fot the UK right?

[Sheilbh]

Congrats on having the most laughable leader of a major western country!

[Zanza]

Long FT article on Britain's place in the world:
https://amp.ft.com/content/7192f64a-bbc4-4a95-9686-c9a3beb884ea

I found one diagram interesting: in peace time, Europe was almost always more important for trade than the Empire, even at the height of Imperial Preference protectionism. I guess the interwar years were an aberration with little trade with fascist countries.

It's also interesting that the biggest decline in Imperial trade happened before 1970, ie. before Britain in EEC. That suggests the trade gravity model holds true and CPTPP ambitions and the new focus on the Indo-Pacific will not work out to compensate for European losses due to Brexit. 

[Josquius]

Shame about the pay wall.

[Tamas]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/20/absolute-carnage-eu-hauliers-reject-uk-jobs-over-brexit-rules

A British freight company director with more than 20 years' experience has told how EU hauliers and transport companies are turning their backs on UK business because they are being asked to provide tens of thousands of pounds in guarantees to cover VAT or potential tariffs on arrival in Britain.

The financial guarantee requirement did not exist before Brexit and EU transport companies who previously provided a shipping service for small and medium-sized firms have decided they do not want the extra financial burden, according to Colin Jeffries, who runs Key Cargo International in Manchester.

"We've got people that are trying to bring textiles in from Italy but we are being told there is no haulage availability on that. Nobody's willing to touch anything because of these guarantees. In Poland, we're trying to get masks in for PPE in the workplace and we can't get anyone to bring them over."

Jeffries, who has been in the freight forwarding business for 24 years, said his business nearly came to a standstill last week because of the sudden trade barriers erected on 1 January.

He said it was "absolute carnage out there" trying to get EU hauliers to come to Britain, because they underestimated the gravity of the financial guarantees, known as T1s, that now apply to goods being exported to the UK.

A truck with a £200,000 cargo would need cash or a T1 financial guarantee document for £40,000 in VAT alone, he said, a significant burden for transport companies with multiple trucks going to the UK.

Before Brexit these guarantees were not required for goods coming from the EU.

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"Many agents who are completing T1s have run out of guarantee funds, which they need to have in place," he added.

He spoke as data showed that an increasing number of freight groups rejected contracts to move goods from France to Britain in the second week of January.

Transporeon, a German software company that works with 100,000 logistics service providers, said freight forwarders had rejected jobs to move goods from Germany, Italy and Poland into Britain.

In the second week of January the rejection rate for transport to the UK was up 168% on the third quarter of 2020 and had doubled in the first calendar week of the year.

Jeffries said one of the problems was how complicated exporting to the UK had become.

While goods could sail through British ports before Brexit, now EU suppliers, like the UK exporters, had to provide a panoply of paperwork before export in addition to the T1 financial guarantee.

Apart from the customs declaration and the T1 financial guarantee they have to provide a Rex (registered exporter system) document to certify the origin of the product, which will determine whether tariffs will apply on entry to the UK or whether they are subject to preferential treatment.

Jeffries also hit out at the government for its repeated refrain to businesses instructing them to go to freight forwarders or customs agents to prepare them for Brexit.

"They haven't issued freight forwarders with a magic book," he said. "A lot of people think we have inside knowledge because the government says go to a freight forwarder or customs agent. But we haven't been given any insight. We are researching this like everyone else and like everyone you can only gain access to some systems from 1 January so you had no time to test systems until it went live."

[Zanza]

Shame about the pay wall.

You can google the title and then somehow the paywall is circumvented by Google. Title is "From Suez to Brexit and back again: Britain's long search for a role"

From Suez to Brexit and back again: Britain's long search for a role
Britain's departure from the EU reopens a difficult debate over its place in the world

A distinguished Whitehall scientist sounded the alarm. Henry Tizard had served during the war as a special emissary between Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt, criss-crossing the Atlantic to manage the exchange of military secrets. A thoughtful, unflashy civil servant, Tizard became chief defence scientist in Clement Attlee's government.

In the summer of 1945, the nation had poured into the streets to celebrate the great victory over Hitler's Nazis. Four years later, as it counted the cost of victory with continuing food rationing and recurring financial crises, Tizard saw a yawning gap between exalted ambition and diminished circumstance. Britain was behaving, he wrote in a Whitehall minute, as if it were still a great power. The world had changed.

Hitler's defeat had marked the end of the Pax Britannica. Great power relations had been reframed by the contest between the US and the Soviet Union. Britain had fallen into the second tier. "We are not a great power and never will be again," wrote Tizard. "We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power we shall soon cease to be a great nation."


There are many reasons why a small majority of those who voted in the 2016 referendum backed Britain's departure from the European Union. Stagnant incomes, austerity, rising inequality, fears about immigration, concerns over sovereignty, regions left behind by globalisation and technological change — all played their part. So too did the desire to deliver a kick to political and business elites.

Tony Blair once told me he thought it a 'duty' to stay on good terms with Washington

The Brexit decision, though, was part also of a broader tapestry, woven through the postwar decades as Britain struggled to find an identity after the loss of empire. In demanding the nation "take back" control, Brexit reached into an idealised past. At its heart was an English exceptionalism that defied the facts of the nation's geography and its waning economic power. Britain had won the war, the story began. The rest of Europe might feel impelled to pool national sovereignty, but the UK could look to the wider world. Anthony Eden's disastrous Suez expedition and the Brexit decision 60 years later were bookends in this search for a role — the first, empire's last trumpet, the second a refusal even after four decades of EU membership to accept a more modest role.

As a reporter, editor and commentator at the FT, I have watched as the argument over Britain's place in Europe has ebbed and flowed for three decades, laying low a succession of Tory leaders along the way. For now the question of EU membership has been settled but the argument about national identity will not go away.


Brexit cannot change the facts of economics, geography and geopolitics. Britain remains as it was — a leading European power, albeit one with far flung interests. Its prosperity and security remain inextricably tied to its own continent and to preservation of a rules-based international order. It will continue to look across the Atlantic for security, but if the past 75 years hold a lesson it is that, outside or inside the EU, it will have to balance its relationship with Washington with close collaboration with its neighbours.

The EU accounts for about 45 per cent of UK trade and it takes only a glance at the revanchism of Vladimir Putin's Russia, Islamists in the Middle East, and violent chaos in the Maghreb to understand that Europe's security is also Britain's. The other message is governments must balance overseas ambition with economic performance. A nation can for a time "punch above its weight", but it has to be able to pay the bills.

In Tizard's day as in our own, such sentiments were not what politicians wanted to hear. Winston Churchill saw Britain as, uniquely, at the intersection of three circles of power — the Empire and Commonwealth, the US and Europe. Churchill counted himself a good European, but unity was for the rest of the continent.


British soldiers wave to United Nations soldiers as they withdraw from El Cap in December 1956. Egypt had nationalised the Suez Canal in July that year © Getty Images

Whitehall scientist Henry Tizard © Getty Images
He was far from alone in his hubris. "Britain's story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe", his foreign secretary Anthony Eden pronounced in 1952. "Our thoughts move across the seas to the many communities in which our people play their part, in every corner of the world, and these are our family ties — that is our life." Every subsequent turn in the postwar story brought a bruising collision between inflated ambition and straitened circumstance. Yet Eden's sentiments have tumbled through the decades, turning up in their latest guise in Boris Johnson's fevered imaginings of a second Elizabethan age.

The conspiracy with France and Israel to take back control of the Suez Canal after its seizure by Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser was soaked in extraordinary duplicity. It was bad enough that Eden lied to parliament and people. He also made the mistake of deceiving the US. The forced retreat from the canal of British forces amid a cacophony of national and international protest drew an indelible line under imperial adventurism.

If the past 75 years hold a lesson it is that, outside or inside the EU, Britain will have to balance its relationship with Washington with close collaboration with its neighbours

Eden had thought Britain's national power and prestige would not survive the defiance of the leader of Arab nationalism. The US president Dwight Eisenhower had other concerns. He cut off Britain's access to international financial support for sterling. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey offered the prime minister a choice between "an immediate ceasefire and a war on the pound". When Eden had looked in the mirror he had seen a great power that could still get its way in the world. Retreat shattered the glass.

Serving during the war with General Eisenhower in Algiers, Harold Macmillan coined the conceit that Britain could act as Greece to America's Rome. Replacing the ruined Eden, Macmillan decided that the road to global influence would run henceforth through Washington. Churchill had freighted the relationship with all manner of emotional baggage — unique linguistic, cultural and historic ties, unbreakable links of kith and kin. For Macmillan, it was a cloak over the shift from global power to membership of the US-led alliance.

John Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary, wrote it down: "The United States is so much the most powerful nation in the western camp that our ability to have our way in the world depends more than anything else upon influence upon her to act in conformity with our interests." Henceforth, Brits would whisper wisdom into the ears of unsophisticated Americans. Margaret Thatcher was never so content as when dancing on the international stage with Ronald Reagan. Tony Blair once told me he thought it a "duty" to stay on good terms with Washington. Boris Johnson is now trying to kick over the traces of his kowtowing to Donald Trump in order to ingratiate himself with Joe Biden.

The awkward question was always when "special" becomes "servile". The Americans eschew emotion in favour of national interest. Britain was bankrupted by the war while the US prospered mightily. Yet Truman cancelled Lend-Lease — the financial lifeline that kept Britain solvent — within weeks of victory.

To be left behind by the US, the Soviet Union and, perhaps, China was one thing. To be eclipsed by those it had rescued or defeated during the second world war was too much for Britain to bear

Dispatched to Washington to negotiate an alternative arrangement, John Maynard Keynes found the US had its own demands. In the description of William Clayton, the assistant secretary of state for economic affairs: "We loaded the British loan negotiations with all the conditions the traffic would bear." Britain's reward for its great sacrifice, the Economist magazine thundered, was "to pay tribute for half a century to those who have been enriched by the war".

Wartime ties between the two nations' military, intelligence and nuclear establishments have continued to thrive. There is a considerable infrastructure of co-operation and reservoir of mutual trust. The difference is, as a senior US administration official once told me: "We [the US] have lots of other special relationships."

Richard Neustadt, an adviser in John F Kennedy's White House, offered a fair description: the UK, he said, was "a middle power, neither equal nor vassal, which history, geography or economics rendered especially significant to us for the time being". Reagan's admiration for Thatcher did not extend to sharing his plans for nuclear accords with Mikhail Gorbachev, or to giving her due warning of the invasion of the Commonwealth state of Grenada. George W Bush appreciated Blair's support for the Iraq war, but denied him a role in its planning.

It was Jacques Delors' grand European vision that infuriated Thatcher. But it was the prospect of a Europe led by a reunified Germany that really alarmed her. The president of the European Commission's plans for single currency brought forth the Lady's famous Bruges speech in which, in September 1988, she declared: "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels."


Margaret Thatcher and Jacques Delors in 1989 © Getty Images

Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev talk at the Kremlin in 1989 © AP
A year later, in September 1989, Thatcher was in the Kremlin, meeting with Gorbachev. The Soviet empire was in turmoil. Hungary had opened its borders to the west, the future of the Berlin Wall was in doubt. Thatcher, according to the Kremlin record, asked the note takers to put down their pens so the leaders could speak without inhibition. At Bruges she had played the Iron Lady, demanding that the EU remember those imprisoned behind the walls of communism. Now, the Kremlin record notes, she assured Gorbachev that Britain and the west did not want German unification: "[We] are not interested in the destabilisation of Eastern Europe or the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact either . . . we will not interfere in them and spur the decommunisation of Eastern Europe."

For a politician who had spent a lifetime denouncing the evils of communism it was an extraordinary démarche — vivid proof of the depths of Thatcher's fear and mistrust of Germany. Her loyal aide Charles Powell later wrote two accounts of the meeting. Only a handful of officials got the full story. We journalists were also kept in the dark. I was among those travelling in the prime minister's rickety VC10 aircraft. We were given no hint of her proposed bargain with Moscow.

Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, later wrote: "Nothing had entered her own life to erase vivid memories of the German past. She did not believe that Germany would subordinate itself to a process of European integration." When Nicholas Ridley, one of her favourite ministers, remarked in an interview that the single currency plan was "a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe", he was giving voice to her instincts. The effect was to add a new toxicity to the rising tide of hardline Euroscepticism in the Conservative party. Britain now faced not just an EU plot but the threat of a Fourth Reich.

Prime ministers always add the adjective "independent" when talking about the British nuclear deterrent. Macmillan's deal with Kennedy in December 1962 to buy the Polaris submarine-based missile system was in its way a personal success. Britain had the bomb but desperately needed a missile to carry it. Kennedy's advisers lined up solidly against the sale. Kennedy overruled his aides, but imposed conditions on the sale. The deterrent would be put at the disposal of Nato. Only if "supreme national interests" were at stake would a British prime minister take full control.


Harold Macmillan and John F Kennedy after a conference in the Bahamas in 1962

Barack Obama and David Cameron at the White House in 2013 © Getty Images
Macmillan's cabinet voiced the obvious concern that the arrangement would create "a suspicion that our military independence was, or might be, less secure than, for example, the French". For all the doubts, Macmillan, it soon turned out, had built a psychological prison from which none of his successors dared try to escape. Independent or otherwise, the deterrent was henceforth deemed a vital emblem of national prestige. Long after the end of the cold war, a close aide to Blair told me that to question its utility in the absence of the Soviet Union would be viewed as something akin to treachery.

When David Cameron struck a deal with Barack Obama to buy the latest Trident missiles, he was merely updating the bargain struck by Macmillan. As for its supposed independence, in the laconic description of Peter Westmacott, who served as ambassador in Washington: "We may want to remain as a power with what we call an independent nuclear deterrent but we have long since given up the option of doing that without the Americans. We are dependent on them for it to work."

Dean Acheson's famous jibe in December 1962 that Britain had lost an empire and failed to find a role was all the more wounding for the British establishment because it knew it to be true. Lodging Britain's first application to join the six-nation common market, Macmillan himself had remarked that: "We have to consider the world as it is today . . . and not in outdated terms of a vanished past." By the early 1960s, the Franco-German market had turned out a success. To be left behind by the US, the Soviet Union and, perhaps, China was one thing. To be eclipsed by those it had rescued or defeated during the second world war was too much for Britain to bear.

In blowing up the European pillar of its foreign policy, Britain is confronted again with Acheson's question

De Gaulle initially blocked the way, but once the common market gathered strength, Britain knew it had to join. There were objectors, of course. The loud arguments about "sovereignty" heard during the 2016 referendum campaign might have been cut-and-pasted from speeches made during the 1960s and early 1970s. Enoch Powell stood at the head of the English nationalists on the Tory right; Tony Benn and Peter Shore were among prominent objectors on the left.

But for more than 40 years after it joined the EC in 1973, Britain seemed to have come up with its riposte to Acheson. Its pursuit of the national interest would rest on the twin pillars of the intimate security relationship with the US and a leading role in the EU. This was often an awkward balancing act but by and large it seemed to work. Britain was a European power with a global outlook. Influence in Washington amplified Britain's say in Brussels — and vice versa.

And now? Soon after the retreat from Suez, Anthony Eden had jotted down some private reflections. The significance, he concluded, was not so much that the debacle had rewritten the future but that it had revealed the harsh realities of relative decline. Brexit demands the same sort of reckoning.


City workers read newspaper reports on the parliamentary vote for common market entry in 1971

The front page of the London Evening Standard showing David Cameron outside 10 Downing Street to announce the results of the EU referendum in 2016 © Getty Images
In blowing up the European pillar of its foreign policy, Britain is confronted again with Acheson's question. Where does it fit in a world dominated by much larger power blocs? The Brexiters have long confused sovereignty with power. The notional sovereignty now reclaimed from Brussels does not confer a capacity to act. Instead, Britain has lost its voice in European affairs and diminished its influence in Washington.

So the reckoning must begin with a touch of humility — how best, in reduced circumstance, can Britain promote its core concerns and objectives. One obvious route is to seek new leverage in stronger bilateral relationships — within Europe and beyond — to promote clubs of liberal democracies that share its liberal democratic values. Alongside its soft power — the language, history and creativity still count — it still has more specific talents to contribute — effective intelligence, a strong diplomatic service, capable armed forces willing to deploy, and a culture comfortable with international problem-solving.

Making a difference, though, demands the insight shown by Tizard more than 70 years ago. The days of great power posturing have passed. As for Europe, history as well as geography and geopolitics tells us that sooner or later Britain will be drawn back to its own continent.

Philip Stephens is the FT's chief political commentator. His book 'Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit' is published this month by Faber & Faber