What global role should a post-imperial, post-Brexit Britain play? Can it reinvent itself in a manner that convinces a population increasingly divided by education, age, race, location, and inequality, let alone the wider world, that it can or should continue to try to punch above its weight?
In his recent book, ‘Britain Alone – the Pathway from Suez to Brexit’, Philip Stevens, the Director of the Editorial Board of the Financial Times, argues that for the last sixty or so years Britain has struggled to identify its place. Successive governments, he believes, have been unable to respond objectively and accept that Britain cannot remain ‘frozen in history’. This has resulted, he says, in a failure to honestly address its weaknesses, resulting in ‘overreach’ and a ‘consistent refusal’ ‘to align the perception of Britain’s standing in the world and the diminishing resources it can generate’.
