Poll campaign reflects Britain’s global retreat

Britain’s membership of the European Union hangs on the outcome of a knife-edge election in four weeks’ time, but the issue and that of the country’s wider global role have been largely absent from a campaign narrowly focused on domestic worries. It’s not unusual for British elections to be dominated by schools, hospitals and taxes, but foreign policy debate has rarely been so slight as before the May 7 vote. This reflects Britain’s shuffle from the global stage and a self-inflicted downgrading of its military and diplomatic muscle. The only full TV debate of the campaign last Thursday, a day of world drama, underscored a pivot towards the parochial. Iran had just sealed an initial nuclear deal with six world powers including Britain; Yemen, a former British colony, was engulfed in fierce fighting; and in Kenya, another former possession, militants had slaughtered more than 100 people. None of those events rated a single mention in the debate, which featured Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and six other party leaders. Instead, the participants discussed Britain’s debts, its stretched public health service and immigration. The only words on foreign policy were about whether there were too many foreigners in Britain and whether leaving the EU would make things better. Former prime minister Tony Blair, channelling fears inside Britain’s foreign policy establishment, said this week that the ballot was a chance to show London wouldn’t turn in itself. “It is about character. It is about who we are and where we’re going as a nation,” said Blair, a fervent believer in liberal interventionism, who led Britain into a string of overseas military engagements from 1997 to 2007. Britain, which under Margaret Thatcher sent a flotilla to the South Atlantic in 1982 to recapture the tiny Falkland Islands seized by Argentina, still packs a global punch. It has the biggest defence budget in the EU, a seat on the UN Security Council and is the world’s sixth biggest economy. It took part in 2011 air strikes against Libya to topple Muammar Gaddafi and only ended its combat role in Afghanistan last year. It also has one of the biggest foreign aid budgets and was at the heart of international efforts to combat Ebola. But some diplomats date London’s retreat from the global stage to August 2013 when Cameron failed to win parliament’s backing for air strikes in Syria. Britain did join the US-led effort to bomb Islamic State targets in Iraq, but only after France piled in. London’s contribution - estimated to average just one air strike per day - is, in the words of parliament’s defence committee “strikingly modest”. On Ukraine, Cameron also took a backseat, leaving his French and German counterparts to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Traumatised by the heavy cost in blood and treasure of Blair’s wars of choice supporting Washington in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was a military success, Britons’ appetite to use force has waned, it seems.