Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has mothballed his predecessors’ projects, large and small, from Liz Truss’s trickle-down tax cuts to Boris Johnson’s revamped royal yacht. But one of Sunak’s most symbolic changes since taking over as Prime Minister five months ago has received less attention: retiring the slogan “Global Britain”.
No longer does the phrase, a swashbuckling relic of Britain’s debate over its post-Brexit role, feature in speeches by cabinet ministers or in the government’s updated military and foreign policy blueprint that it released last Monday.
In its place, Sunak has hashed out workmanlike deals on trade and immigration with Britain’s nearest neighbours — France and the rest of the European Union. In the process, analysts and diplomats said, he has begun, for the first time since Britain’s departure from the European Union, to chart a realistic role on the global stage.
Global Britain, as propounded by Johnson, was meant to evoke a Britain, unshackled from Brussels, that could be agile and opportunistic, a lightly regulated, free-trading powerhouse. In practice, it came to symbolise a country with far-fetched ambitions and, under Johnson, a habit of squabbling with its neighbours.
Sunak has changed all of that, with a pragmatic approach that, to some extent, reflects his button-down, technocratic style. (In domestic policy, he has also shunned the ideological experimentation of Truss and the bombastic politics of Johnson in favour of a more methodical approach to Britain’s deep-rooted economic problems.) But a leader’s style matters, and on the world stage Sunak’s no-bombast approach is paying eye-catching dividends. In the past few weeks, he has struck a deal with Brussels on trade in Northern Ireland, eased years of Brexit-related tensions with France, inaugurated the next phase of a submarine alliance with Australia and the US, and announced 11 billion pounds (about $13.3 billion) in increased military spending over the next five years, cementing Britain’s role as a leading supplier of weapons to Ukraine.
“It’s too early to say whether Sunak has found a role for post-Brexit Britain,” said Peter Westmacott, who served as Britain’s ambassador to France and to the US. “But he has banished the much-ridiculed ‘Global Britain’ Johnsonian slogan, preferring to under-promise and over-deliver. He’s also moved fast to fix some of the obstacles to better relations with our partners.”
New York Times News Service
