Inward-looking election campaign reflects Britain's global retreat
LONDON |
(Reuters) - Britain's membership of the European Union hangs on the outcome of a knife-edge election in four weeks' time, but the issue and that of the country's wider global role have been largely absent from a campaign narrowly focused on domestic worries.
It's not unusual for British elections to be dominated by schools, hospitals and taxes, but foreign policy debate has rarely been so slight as before the May 7 vote.
Many diplomats say this reflects Britain's shuffle from the global stage and a self-inflicted downgrading of its military and diplomatic muscle.
"While much of the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, there has been little talk about Britain’s international role and responsibilities," Chris Patten, Britain's last governor of Hong Kong, said in a Project Syndicate commentary.
"The UK was once famous for punching above its weight in global affairs, but perhaps the country no longer really matters much – if only because it does not want to matter," the former Conservative Party chairman and European Commissioner said.
The only full TV debate of the campaign last Thursday, a day of world drama, underscored a pivot towards the parochial.
Iran had just sealed an initial nuclear deal with six world powers including Britain; Yemen, a former British colony, was engulfed in fierce fighting; and in Kenya, another former possession, Islamist militants had slaughtered over 100 people.
None of those events rated a single mention in the debate, which featured Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and six other party leaders.
Instead, the participants discussed Britain's debts, its stretched public health service and immigration.
The only words on foreign policy were about whether there were too many foreigners in Britain and whether leaving the EU would make things better.
How many Syrians should be let in, how many foreigners are treated free for HIV, and, briefly, whither Britain's membership of the EU ahead a possible referendum on the subject in 2017.
Cameron has promised to renegotiate Britain's EU ties if re-elected, before holding an in-out vote. His rival, Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, has said he won't offer a referendum unless there is a major new transfer of powers to the EU.
That means the election will decide whether or not Britain votes on its EU membership, something it last did in 1975.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, channelling fears inside Britain's foreign policy establishment, said on Tuesday the ballot was a chance to show London wouldn't turn in itself.
"It is about character. It is about who we are and where we're going as a nation," said Blair, a fervent believer in liberal interventionism, who led Britain into a string of overseas military engagements from 1997 to 2007.
"A decision to exit Europe would say a lot about us and none of it good: that, with all the challenges of the world crowding in upon us, demanding strong and clear leadership, instead of saying 'here's where the world should go', we say 'count us out'," the Labour politician said in a speech.
GLOBAL PUNCH
Britain, which under Margaret Thatcher sent a flotilla to the South Atlantic in 1982 to recapture the tiny Falkland Islands seized by Argentina, still packs a global punch.
It has the biggest defence budget in the EU, a seat on the U.N. Security Council and is the world's sixth biggest economy.
It took part in 2011 air strikes against Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi and only ended its combat role in Afghanistan last year. It also has one of the biggest foreign aid budgets and was at the heart of international efforts to combat Ebola.
But some diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, date London's retreat from the global stage to August 2013 when Cameron failed to win parliament's backing for air strikes in Syria.
"Things have never been quite the same since," said one.
Britain did join the U.S.-led effort to bomb Islamic State targets in Iraq, but only after Francepiled in. London's contribution - estimated to average just one air strike per day - is, in the words of parliament's defence committee "strikingly modest."
On Ukraine, Cameron also took a backseat, leaving his French and German counterparts to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.
When asked by one worried lawmaker where this left Britain's "so-called leading role in Europe", Cameron urged parliament's liaison committee earlier this year not to fret.
"We should not be too precious about not being involved in every different set of negotiations," he said. "There is no point endlessly obsessing about whether you are in the room."
Traumatised by the heavy cost in blood and treasure of Blair's wars of choice supporting Washington in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was a military success, Britons' appetite to use force has waned.
General Nicholas Hougton, the head of the armed forces, says the country that helped defeat Hitler and Napoleon has become alarmingly nervous about deploying military force.
"I worry that as a nation we could have started to lose some of our courageous instinct: the instinct to take risk and to make sacrifice both for our own security and the common good," Houghton said in December.
Britain's debt woes - a hangover from the 2008 global financial crisis - have played a role. Under pressure to cut a large deficit, Cameron has taken an axe to state spending.
As a result, the armed forces are being shrunk by around a sixth, a move that will leave the army with 82,000 soldiers in 2018, its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars.
Britain has long boasted of how, unlike most NATO members, it spent 2 percent of Gross Domestic Product on defence. Ahead of the election, neither Cameron nor the Labour Party is ready to pledge that will continue.
One veteran Washington hawk says London's austerity-driven defence cuts are emboldening Western foes from Moscow to Beijing and the Middle East.
"Our mutual adversaries immediately assume, all too accurately, that a weakened Britain reflects a weakened America, and they are emboldened," John Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush, wrote in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
Insiders complain that the British Foreign Office, housed in a grand building in central London from which one fifth of humanity was administered less than a century ago, is a shadow of its former self.
Under Cameron, its budget has been cut by around one sixth in real terms since 2010, and many residual resources have been diverted towards trade promotion rather than classic diplomacy.
The change has not gone unnoticed by allies and foes.
A long list of U.S. politicians and military commanders from President Barack Obamadownwards have urged Britain to stay in the EU and to spend more on defence.
And in Europe, even friends say they have grown weary of Cameron's attempts to score political points at home by fabricating minor rows or by turning discussion of any EU issue, from Greece's debts to France's economy, to domestic advantage.
"Whatever happened to British foreign policy?" lamented one EU diplomat recently. "They’re missing in action everywhere."
(Additional reporting by Alastair Macdonald and Paul Taylor in Brussels; Editing by Paul Taylor)
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