From a column in the Guardian today by Madeleine Bunting:
What "punching above your weight" means in practice is unbridled ambition and massive risk-taking. The obvious parallels with BP are those other former giants of British corporate power, the banks HBOS and RBS. All are now cautionary tales of corporate hubris. In 1998 Blair made a speech in Dublin in which he talked of Britain "emerging from a post-imperial malaise". It was the era of Cool Britannia and the beginning of Blair's military adventures: culture, finance, military participation and corporate ambition were the key, mutually reinforcing, planks of his project.
One by one they have either led us to some form of disaster (financial sector, BP), or to embarrassing failure (liberal interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan). Last August Newsweek's London bureau chief, Stryker McGuire, wrote an influential front-cover article on how time was up for "once-great Britain". He argued that Blair had tried one final stab at greatness by locking Britain into America's wars, but that he was merely postponing the inevitable decline in the country's place in the world.
This is one of those issues on which it is very hard for politicians to conduct a serious conversation. Nick Clegg was pilloried in the election campaign for his commonsense remarks on Britain's second-class status in the world. It is compulsory piety for politicians to talk of Britain as great, and anyone who challenges that delusion is dismissed as talking Britain down. But we should be very wary of delusions of grandeur now that we are counting the cost of the devastating fallout – from the Gulf of Mexico and the Muslim world to the bank bailouts – of a decade and a half of this notion of punching above our weight.
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