Rethinking Britain's Greatness

Hardly a day goes by in London that some august gathering or eminent institution is not considering, or reconsidering, Britain's role in the world. Never more so than right now, with a new government settling in and budgetary axes flying up and down every corridor in Whitehall.

In this working paper, Michael Codner, director of Military Science at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), elegantly lays out the choices confronting Britain as one of the world's great military powers and America's most capable and important fighting ally. A taste: "The UK is currently the fourth biggest defence spender in the world but the ninth largest economy. In other words, the country pays more for defence than its world economic standing justifies. The dilemma turns on the retention of world status; if the taxpayer is unprepared to fund defence at current levels (2.3 per cent GDP), Britain will be unable to prevent its dwindling international influence. The UK could make moderate defence cuts or even slash defence spending to the NATO European average of 1.65 per cent. Either way, large cuts could be made if Britain abandoned its predilection for perceived world influence."

Seeing Through the Fog

Amid all the huffing and puffing in post-revolution Britain, two really standout pieces of commentary: Martin Kettle in the Guardian, who says, among other things, "No Conservative leader has taken such a risk for such essentially liberal ends in living memory," and Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, who says, "All British political careers end in failure. Mr Brown’s is a grim reminder of this truth. But it is far too easy to blame him alone for the UK’s current plight. The truth, I would argue, is that his biggest error was to believe in the conventional wisdom about the prospects for durable economic stability, the robustness of modern financial markets and, surprisingly perhaps, the strength of the post-Thatcher UK economy. He then doubled up on this bet by building his plans for public spending on the assumption that the good times would roll on forever. Mr Brown’s boasts of durable prosperity proved to be based on evanescent success. The inconvenient truth is that the UK economy proved far more fragile than almost anybody with influence had believed. If the new government is to succeed, it must dare to confront this sad truth."