Britain is great

Patrick Cosgrave

Sometimes a political commentator should be allowed to write about his hopes for politics and politicians, rather than his criticisms of them. Sometimes, too, he should be allowed to ape the manner of predecessors more distinguished than himself. No time is more suitable for these twin indulgences than the outset of a general election campaign — that moment of twilight between the summoning of the party armies to battle and their actual engagement. By the time, dear reader, that you peruse these lines the battle will be well and truly joined. Nonetheless, tonight I write about my hopes; and I ape the manner of the best political writer ever to grace these columns — Mr Henry Fairlie.

Mr Fairlie, in his writing, is accustomed to drawing truth from vignette. So, in a most provoking article in the current issue of Encounter he draws, sometimes mystically, on incidents he has observed in public life in the United States to argue a case about the Nixon Presidency. His American observations do not concern me now; his manner of evidence does. Last Sunday, after an editorial lunch at which inter atia the subject of this column was discussed I went home and watched the early evening news on BBC television. Two minutes watching convinced me that the subject of the column should be altered.

What I saw was Mr Callaghan, wind-blown, in America, saying that Dr Kissinger must be the leader in any effort for the relief of the victims of the Honduras disaster, but that, under Mrs Hart, we had a disaster section, in Britain, which would do its best to make our help efficient. I pass quickly over the quality of Mrs Hart's disaster section in order to say that there should be no way in which Dr Kissinger should be allowed to lead Britain in Honduras, where we have had a colony.

There has been, in the last ten years, a visible contraction in the British view of foreign affairs. It has been as marked under Tory as under Labour governments, but it has been meaner and more slavish when done by Labour foreign secretaries: as the Cyprus crisis showed, Mr Callaghan would do anything rather than offend the Americans. Mr Heath was often boorish and insensitive in international relations — especially, perhaps, at the Singapore conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers, early in his period as Prime Minister — but he never knuckled under. He had — he has — a contracted view of Britain's part in world affairs — a view confined to a reading of our relations with the continental powers — but he would never feel that as a matter of obvious politics Britain should be led, anywhere in the world, by anybody else. -Even so, Mr Heath's vision of Britain is a small one.

And any reasonable, historically based, politically intelligible understanding of Britain in the world must be large. By giving up an empire this island did not forfeit a role — it took one on. Mr Powell, in one of his most striking addresses, derided the message of the verse suggesting that they know nothing of England who only England know. His suggestion was that this country's greatness resided only in herself. It does not. An Empire — the greatest, the largest and the best the known world has ever seen — does not leave the people who created it unmarked, Britain cannot exist without being great; and the greatness involves a British judgement about what can be done for the rest of the world. That is a detritus of empire. Mr Powell is wrong when, comparing the.

British to the Roman and Greek empires he argues that the mother country was never in its racial or national character corrupted or altered by its association with the empire, and that this is a characteristic or experience enjoyed by no other imperial mother country. For the same happened in the case of the Spanish Empire, and the French: the mother countries in both cases retained their whole identities in spite of a long association with subject countries of different racial character. The vital point, however, is not the extent to which the mother countries avoided being marked by their experience, but the extent to which they were marked.

Britain was marked more than either of the other two. This can be seen most readily in the recurring willingness of the House of Commons to suspend its business and give up a day to debating some obscure foreign affair or other.

Sometimes this is merely silly, and the

exaggeration of what is commonly called the British role in such matters is particularly so,

The left wing of the Labour party most often

displays an exaggeration which totally loses touch with reality about the effect a British

judgement or a British assertion can have on a far away and foreign situation. But the instinct to debate such matters is a worthy instinct, and one not to be despised.

It is in this vital area of the country's understanding of herself and the size of her vision that the departure of Sir Alec Douglas-Home from active-politics is of most consequence. As clearly as any other of our statesmen Sir Alec appreciated the decline in our actual power and influence around the world. But his understanding of that decline in no way prevented him from trying to organise his thought so as to maximise what influence Britain had at the same time as he re-thought our place in the increasingly complex and dangerous world of international politics. In his career he thus added a necessary dimension of dignity to his country.

No other politician of our times has managed to preserve intact that kind of moral and political understanding. Mr Wilson, who began his career as Prime Minister as an internationalist was also the first Prime Minister to devote

almost whole of a speech to the Lord

M.aaor's banquet to matters economic; he was followed in that lamentable departure from tradition by Mr Heath. During his period of office in 1964-70 Mr Wilson was more often than not preoccupied with international affairs: since February of this year he has scarcely if at all so concerned himself. (I should add that I do not regard the kind of involvement, for or against, with the business of our relations with the European continent such as we have seen from either Mr Heath or Mr Wilson, as seriously foreign political: a British dimension of foreign policy must be very much bigger than that). The trouble with Mr Wilson after 1964 was, of course, that he was all too willing to abandon foreign policies seriously entered into under the pressure of party exigency, and his activity as his own foreign secretary was frequently so comic in its ineffectiveness as to bring the whole business of conducting a foreign policY into disrepute.

e

Mr Heath has been much more like Mr Pollav....

— there are more similarities between the two man than any account of the personal hostility that exists like a fence between them would lead one to suppose. From Singapore onwards Mr Heath seemed to retreat into a foreign policy redoubt, unable or unwilling to devote any large part of his remarkable energy to the development or sustaining of a truly wide-ranging foreign policy. The consequence of the prime ministerial stewardship of both himself and Mr Wilson has been a part of that contraction of the British view of the world which I mentioned at the beginning.

Of course the crucial problem the country now faces is that of inflation. Of course the European policies of both major parties has deprived th,e British of part of their self-confidence and self-confident ability to pronounce judgement on and even intervene in affairs very far overseas. Of course it is understandable that, puzzled and hurt by our failure over many years to establish a sound and on-going economic base at home, we have tended to neglect our unique ability to think in a large way and on a large scale. It is 'nonetheless a tragedy that general foreign policy figures in no significant way in the manifestos of either major party as we enter the second general election of 1974.

Yet, there is one point of hope that Must be observed. In the Conservative Party at least there is always some hope for an enlargement, of vision. The left wing view of international politics is always, indeed of necessity, structuralist and doctrinal. As the Labour Party becomes more and more obsessed by, more and more dogmatic about the way affairs are organised in British society, its vision of What happens abroad becomes more and more arid, whether Mr Heffer is declaiming about Chile, or Mrs Hart is trying to reconcile her dogmatism with the functions of her pathetically inadequate little disaster section, or Mr Callaghan is sucking up to the Americans. In the Conservative Party there are a dozen or more men of some vision and some genuine interest in international politics, including the present leader of the party. I believe, as Mr Fairlie would say, that it merely needs a politician to assert aloud the continuing international function of being Britain for the people to raise their eyes from the domestic matters with which they have been encouraged exclusively to preoccupy themselves for this country to find herself again at the centre of affairs, just as the vision of General de Gaulle restored France to such a position on his return to power in the late 'fifties. I repeat: Britain is not Britain if she is following the United States in Honduras, or if she is not asserting herself in a considerable and individual international role. Enough, however, of metaphysics. I assert their importance this week only as a vital part of the background to subsequent studies of the preoccupations which will appear on the surface of the present election campaign.