Power and status are dangerous concepts, particularly if they are illusory.
Michael Russell’s thoughtful position paper on the SNP’s external affairs policy is an assault on false ideas of power and status. It is a mature exercise in the adjustment of aspirations. This is welcome when our UK government seems obsessed with its role at the supposed top table of world nations.
Look at the actual record of this particular UK government. It has failed to get other European powers – notably France, Italy and Germany – to play their proportionate parts, especially in the commitment of manpower, in the current Nato mission in Afghanistan. For a moment, leave aside the argument of whether we should be there or not. The fact is that we are, in significant numbers – while the French, Italians and Germans are hardly there at all.
Labour spokeswomen such as Ann McKechin and Anne McGuire, responding to the SNP paper, seemed obsessed with the UK’s role as a “top table” power. Why sit at the top table if those around you just ignore you? The British Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary have been treated with derision by their counterparts in the three European countries mentioned.
If the UK is influential, why cannot its senior politicians and diplomats persuade our major European allies to do what we regard as eminently reasonable and necessary? The sad answer is that we are no longer influential. We are treated either as a poodle of the Americans, or as post- imperial fantasists. Ann McKechin and Anne McGuire should not be satisfied with this pitiful role at the so-called top table.
As for the UN Security Council, which Ann McKechin also mentioned,
we’re only on it because of our status as a nuclear power. Our so-called deterrent is increasingly irrelevant. It is also grotesquely expensive, ludicrously so for a state already living well beyond its means. We really have no rightful place on the Security Council when vastly more important emerging powers are denied a place at that particular top table.
Back in Afghanistan, the US will come to understand that victory in any conventional sense is impossible. Attention may then switch to other states: not so much Pakistan, which poses unique problems, but rather Yemen and Somalia. These two unstable states are general threats to the west, particularly as potential training grounds for terrorist extremists. Even in its current condition, the UK could exercise more useful influence in these states than the US. But is our supposedly independent foreign policy tilting in this direction? Not a bit of it. We just wait for the American lead, if lead is the appropriate word.
I’d rather be a citizen of a small, realistic and honest nation than a bigger one practising the grandiose international politics of illusion and bluster. But, then, the very idea of an independent Scotland directing its own modest but decent foreign policy might make certain apologists for the current UK government choke on their cornflakes, or whatever they imagine is eaten at top tables.
Our subservience to the US does us an ill-service. The US will remain a world power, but the overall global balance is shifting fast, not just in favour of obvious coming superpowers such as China, India and Russia, but also emerging nations like Brazil, Mexico and Turkey. A far-sighted foreign policy would aim to develop useful links with such coming powers. The trouble is that the UK’s foreign policy, as practised by our current failing government, is rooted in the past, not the future.
For many Unionists, of whatever party, the incubus of Britain’s imperial past is something they cannot shake off. Some of this past was glorious; some of it was wretched. But these days are long gone. Even Harold Wilson, of all people, understood this as he prepared for power in the early 1960s. Yet many contemporary Labour politicians seem to base their aspirations on former imperial glories rather than on the current, much more meagre abilities of the UK. Some of us have worked out that the UK is not what it used to be.
