The world is nostalgic for a respected Britain, is waiting for a mature Canada, and India is surging. Instead of Britain standing outside the door of Europe and Canada and India shivering in the shadow of America or China, and the Anzacs alone at the end of the earth, we should collaborate, for our collective good and for the stability in the world. The United Kingdom is floundering through its seventh consecutive failed government and is attempting to redefine its secession from the European Union by creeping backwards toward it, having almost severed its alliance with the United States by equivocating between that country and Iran, the world‘s greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the current conflict. At the same time, Prime Minister Mark Carney has assigned Canada and himself the role of rounding up disgruntled, so-called middle powers that harbour grievances against the United States, in particular, and getting them all to stand upon each other’s shoulders so that they will be taken more seriously in the chancelleries of the world. Both the U.K. and Canada have been thrust into these improbable vocations by prolonged mismanagement of their own foreign relations and national interests.
Both these concepts are nonsense. Almost all of Europe is approaching a crisis of decadence and survival. It remains to be seen if Europe can sensibly control immigration, confine it to assimilable people earnestly seeking to join a new nationality, and not just migrants seeking prosperity in jurisdictions to which they tender no loyalty. They must also revive their birth-rate. Tied up in this is the question of whether Britain, in particular, will return to the ethos of protecting all minorities rather than turning a blind eye to one minority, e.g. Muslim extremists targeting a smaller minority, the Jews, for craven political reasons. And it also remains to be seen if the British political class can respond to the legitimate complaints of citizens of modest income to acute economic pressure caused by waves of immigration for which no provision to house them has been made, rather than falsely prosecuting their own working class for racism when government incompetence is responsible for their unaffordable housing.
Instead of Britain bobbing like a cork in the North Sea, leaderless and bullied by halfwit ecological extremists into shutting down its own offshore oil sources, and Canada, with the world’s twelfth largest GDP, calling itself a middle power and leading a Halloween trick-or- treat parade of grumpy little countries, they should revive the old Commonwealth, and join forces with Australia and New Zealand and Singapore, with a special relationship with India. They should negotiate as much free or structured trade and overarching policy agreement between them as meets their joint convenience. The existing Commonwealth is a ceremonious relic. The European Union is economically stagnant and over-bureaucratized, and the United States, for all its power and irrepressible vitality, temperamental and subject to abrupt shifts of position. It is too dominating a country to be subject to the normal constraints of continuity. (For the U.S. president to refer to Canada as the 51st state of the U.S. is outrageous.)
An association of the original Commonwealth could focus its collective foreign aid efforts on underdeveloped Commonwealth members and with India included would have a combined GDP of approximately $15 trillion, putting it fourth behind the United States, China, and the European Union. The King, in addition to being the British monarch, could be the joint chief of state of the other associated countries with the co-chief effectively performing that role and shedding the anomalous colonial position of governor general. That was a perfectly adequate title for Lord Dorchester and Lord Elgin but is an anachronism today.
Britain’s immense status and seniority are being compromised. It and France are the senior states of the Western world. They both started to emerge as coherent countries in the aftermath of the barbarian deluge over the Western Roman empire in the fifth century A.D. Germany and Italy were only unified in the 19th century, and Italy has always been overshadowed by the papacy, including in current times. Russia only emerged as a European state in the second millennium A.D.; it took most of the Middle Ages for Spain to expel or subdue the Muslims and it was only unified in the 16th century when its explorers discovered the riches of the New World.
Britain’s ability for four centuries, ending between the World Wars, to put its hand on the balance of the Great Powers of Europe and keep them embroiled with each other while maintaining the world’s greatest navy and using it to acquire whatever it wanted in the world including North America and India, made Britain the greatest power in the world between the departure of Napoleon and the rise of America. And it has been sustained as an influential country by the fact that Winston Churchill inspired the forces of freedom in every land and the future of Western civilization rested on his and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s shoulders almost alone in World War II. Such was the prestige of Churchillian Britain earned by the Gloriana of its resistance to Nazi Germany, that Britain made the smoothest transition in history from the front rank of the world’s powers to the front of the second rank as the most influential ally of the new preeminent state in the world. It is this relationship with the United States, so absolutely necessary and brilliantly executed by both countries under Roosevelt and Churchill, and significantly revived in the satisfactory end of the Cold War under President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that has, to use current terminology, been so substantially degraded under recent inept British leaders.
In his first term, President Trump said to the first post-Brexit British Prime Minister, Theresa May, that “a strong and independent Britain is a blessing to the world.” The British paid no attention. May and her two successors, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, were booted from office by their own MPs in three years. Their successor, Rishi Sunak, was turfed by the voters in favour of Keir Starmer, who after two years is teetering on the brink of eviction by his own party. The United Kingdom has generally been seen as the most stable large democracy in the world for nearly 350 years since the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1687. We can and must all d better than we are now, and complaining about Trump is no answer, though it is occasionally justified.
National Post