A new pamphlet recommends that the Foreign Office should be abolished because it’s a relic of Britain’s imperial past. So far, so tediously predictable in this era of mandatory self-flagellation over “white privilege”.
This is not, however, a report from the department of resentment studies at the University of Penge. The pamphlet has been written by the former cabinet secretary Lord Sedwill, the former No 10 foreign policy adviser Tom Fletcher and the former Foreign Office director-general Moazzam Malik, with a supporting cast of former ministers, national security advisers and other top officials. In other words, pooh-bahs who have been helping shape Britain’s foreign policy for decades.
You might think that people whose job it has been to project Britain on the world stage would have a keen appreciation of Britain’s historic strengths as a nation. Think again. It’s the historic character of the nation with which they have a problem. They are appalled in particular by the image of Britain’s “greatness”, which seems “anachronistic”.
The identity of the Foreign Office clearly gives them conniptions. Its very name, the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, is “anchored in the past” — the horror! — even though the “Development” bit was only added in 2020.
They even have a problem with the neoclassical, 19th-century Foreign Office building, which they say hints at an identity that’s “somewhat elitist and rooted in the past” (the double crime of crimes). Modernising the place “with fewer colonial-era pictures on the walls” might send “a clear signal about Britain’s future”.
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So what would their replacement international affairs department actually do that would be different? They want it to attack climate change (of course) and biodiversity loss, support international development and champion “rights and responsibilities”. Motherhood and apple pie recipes are presumably somewhere in there too.
Beyond that, they want to maximise “soft power” by projecting assets such as the universities, news organisations and Britain’s “formidable military” to “maximise the country’s considerable ‘soft power’”. This is “what Britain is good at”. They appear oblivious to the fact that the universities have become places where open minds go to die, that the BBC is now a dumbed-down conduit for progressive propaganda, and that the once formidable military has been so emasculated it can no longer defend the nation.
Tellingly, they omit the most valuable of all sources of soft power — the King and the royal family. Indeed, the authors’ wishlist omits everything that makes Britain specifically and culturally British. In the pamphlet’s foreword, Sedwill writes: “For the past decade, we have been wrestling with our national identity.” His pamphlet projects a nation without an identity.
Downgrading the nation, it also downgrades its security. The National Security Council, it complains, is too much preoccupied with … security. It needs to add other objectives such as economic development and — three guesses — climate change.
These avatars of Britain’s future place in the world bang the drum for British powerlessness. Even though they acknowledge that the UK is the sixth largest global economy and “a top-5 shareholder in most international financial institutions”, they think Britain no longer has the capacity to be a major economy. It should line itself up instead with Switzerland and Norway, which are “linked to major economic neighbours”.
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Is it any wonder the Foreign Office fought so fanatically to prevent the UK from gaining independence from the EU? Given how they talk Britain down, is it any wonder foreign policy has been so craven in the face of tyrants and fanatics, and been based on such profound misunderstanding and underestimation of the West’s enemies?
Is it any wonder that Britain has grovelled to Iran, refusing even to acknowledge that the Islamic regime has been at war with the West for more than 40 years, and acting instead as principal cheerleader for the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal, which funnelled billions of dollars in sanctions relief into Tehran’s terrorist war chest?
Is it any wonder that, when David Cameron was prime minister, his major contribution to foreign policy was his gung-ho participation in the toppling of Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi, a miscalculation that led to the rise of Islamic State?
Is it any wonder that now he is at his ideological home in the Foreign Office, Cameron is threatening to cut off arms to Israel as it fights the genocidal threat by Hamas — even while Britain continues to genuflect to Hamas’s Islamist patron, Qatar; and after Britain lined up last month with Russia and China against Israel at the UN security council in its call for an immediate and unconditional Ramadan ceasefire in Gaza?
This pamphlet isn’t saying there’s something wrong with the culture of the Foreign Office. These authors are the culture of the Foreign Office, whose default narrative involves talking down Britain’s historic identity and the achievements of the West. The pamphleteers’ complaint is rather that the values and identity of the country aren’t shaped in the Foreign Office’s own image, as represented by themselves.
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Fletcher says he hopes the report will kick-start a conversation about the reform of UK foreign affairs. What it should kick-start is a conversation about the national self-loathing of the Foreign Office hive mind.
