From The New York Times
The New York Times 20/Jan/2017
Theresa May’s ‘Global Britain’ Is Baloney:Roger Cohen
So Theresa May, the British prime minister who was not elected to her post, wants to create something called “Global Britain.” She thought about alternative branding — “Parochial Britain” — but was advised it was unsexy.
She wants to achieve this by taking Britain out of the European Union, out of a single market of a half-billion people and into a new “embrace” of the world — excluding, of course, Spaniards, the French, Germans, Italians, Swedes and their ilk.
The prime minister is so keen on the idea that she used the word “global” 17 times in her speech on Tuesday setting out her Brexit plans.
Madam, thou doth protest too much.
The Onion’s headline was: “May to European Union: Drop Dead. May to World: We Love You.” Actually, that was not in The Onion but should have been.
I wonder if May, who studied geography at Oxford University, has ever taken a stroll round London, that inward-looking city where you never hear a foreign tongue. After 43 years in what is now called the European Union, the British capital has become insufferably insular. Its cuisine lacks variety. Its financial institutions have no international heft. Its skyline speaks of stunted ambition. Its culture is provincial, its theater hidebound and its worldview small-minded.
No wonder May felt she had to take London global.
And Britain as a whole! For 43 years the country has been a member of an introverted, stifling little entity called the European Union that has just concluded a free trade deal with Canada, has dozens of multilateral and bilateral trade agreements, boasts the United States as its top trading partner, takes some 44 percent of British exports, and accounts for 22 percent of world economic output.
How could Britain possibly be global within this straitjacket?
No, it had to get out of Europe to go global (and make sure its citizens could no longer work in Europe)! The June 23 referendum, May insisted, was “the moment we chose to build a truly global Britain.”
I know this is a political moment when black equals white, no means yes, two plus two equals five, and post-truth is the phrase du jour. Still, this was a Trump-size whopper from May. She had obviously been steeped in Orwell before her oration.
The vote for Brexit was in fact the moment Britain turned its back on the world, succumbing to pettiness, anti-immigrant bigotry, lying politicians, self-delusion and vapid promises of restored glory.
“Global Britain” is a specious branding effort designed to mask an expensive mistake, opposed by 48 percent of voters.
Now, a memory stirs. May at the Conservative Party Conference last October saying this: “But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”
So much for May and her global baloney: She doesn’t like people who move from country to country, who may feel allegiance to more than one, and who have concluded that the most useful form of citizenship these days is one dedicated not only to the well-being of a Berkshire parish, say, but to the planet.
Global Britain without global citizens, please!
There was at least one honest sentence in her speech: “Brexit must mean control of the number of people who come to Britain from Europe.” That, you see, is what it was all about: too many Poles and Romanians doing jobs nobody else wants.
May rambled. She does not want the single market (because it entails free movement of E.U. citizens). But, oh, maybe she wants bits of it. Like for the export of cars or freedom to provide financial services across borders. May has already had to make promises to Nissan to stop the Japanese automaker from getting out of Sunderland. She’s terrified financial institutions will quit the City en masse.
Her comeuppance awaits in the form of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who knows global baloney when she sees it. You don’t have your cake and eat it in negotiations with Merkel.
I write as President-elect Donald Trump is about to become President Trump. Nobody really has any idea of what will happen after that. President Vladimir Putin says that Trump would never run after Russian “girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.”
Good to know that at least.
May seems to see Trump as her global ace in the hole, her counterweight to the European Union. She has been making nice to him. Her government has voiced extraordinary public criticism of Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech on Israel-Palestine, and largely shunned a Middle East conference in Paris the Trump team opposed. In her speech, May pointedly remarked that Britain was not “at the back of the queue” for a trade deal with the United States, as President Obama warned, but at the front in the hour of Trump.
Global Britain! Make America Great Again! Russia for Russians! As Orwell is said to have observed, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" |
