The Prime Minister's foreign policy speech at the Mansion House on 16 November did not stir the nation. Foreign policy, unless it relates to the conduct of the war in Afghanistan, is now far less interesting than a domestic struggle for power that may lead to a new Government in the first half of 2010.

Like all electorates in all democracies when there is no enemy physically in sight, bread-and-butter issues and point-scoring dominate the agenda. Lobby group after lobby group throws its hat in the ring to draw attention to some crisis in governance whose reform, it hopes, will enter into the manifestos.

Foreign Policy Under Gordon Brown

But Brown's speech is worth noting because, like all Prime Ministerial Speeches, it represents not only a set of political choices but the preferences of a bureaucratic State that will carry them into its own dialogue with a new political administration.

Foreign policy tends to show more continuity than change between administrations than do other areas of policy. The political component of the Speech is also the position of the dominant faction within New Labour and, if defeated, it may become contested when Gordon Brown is required to resign.

So what makes Brown distinctive and how will the Tories respond to his legacy if they are in Government next year?

The first point to make is that the UK under New Labour remains truly internationalist and Atlanticist in orientation. The top issues for Brown are economic recovery, climate change, nuclear non-proliferation and the Atlantic alliance against 'global terrorism'. All require international, specifically US, co-operation.

The idea of a 'shared vision' and of global institutions into which the 'world' (meaning the Western-led world) sinks its sovereignties is non-negotiable. It still remains unclear just how much the Conservative Party will drift back into a more nationalist stance if it is in power. Not as much as some think.

The Progressive Component

With an eye to his own crumbling political base, the Prime Minister spoke of 'great social movements' for 'common action'. This is the internationalism of the Left attempting to capture the soft end of the developmentalist and environmentalist movements against both radicalism and nationalism.

In this he is consistent with the general thrust of progressive thought since the ideology of the Labour Party was reformulated along post-Marxist lines in the mid-1990s. He is attempting to appeal to a post-imperial concern with 'making amends' and creating a better world.

The idealistic quasi-religious aspects of this ideology should not underestimated. All the passion that once went into Marxism has been diverted over two decades into a new global egalitarian model in which belief is as important as fact.

This is obviously so with climate change where the numbers who actually understand the science of climate change (we do not) are miniscule compared to those engaged with it as a policy issue at the very highest level. It is not a national interest but an international moral issue for the New Labour Left.

New Labour foreign policy is a hybrid of idealism and of Western, but not necessarily national, self interest where the capture of the West's military and ideological power as a progressive force in international affairs is central to the project.

The US Dimension

Brown's speech might be compared with Obama's interventions in China today where we have a similar programme adapted to American needs - economic recovery (in this case, more assertively related to trade imbalances), climate change and non-proliferation.

The differences are only that the British Prime Minister is still stuck on the war on terror groove because the UK is stuck in West Asia, while the US President had to appeal to his liberal internationalists at home with talk of human rights and Tibet in defiance of the nationalism bubbling in China's streets.

The US and UK are thus almost precisely on message with each other. The junior status of the UK in the Atlantic system might be taken as read but this raises another conundrum for analysts of a possible Tory Government - to what extent will it or can it break free of the US' own progressive agenda?

Given the fact that (as Peter Oborne's documentary noted) the Israeli lobby is shifting funds into the Tory Party, that the Tory Party is not only Atlanticist but has its own neo-conservative wing and that Cameron has already sold the pass on euro-sceptic nationalism, continuity seems likely.

Cameron is also committed to economic recovery (though his methods will be different and perhaps more amenable to the US), to climate change and to non-proliferation. His position on Afghanistan is not withdrawal (as most British people want) but better equipment!

Although the Conservatives will not have the progressive crusading zeal or rhetoric of New Labour and may be waiting out Obama for a more rightist Republican Administration, there is little sign that a vote for the Tory Party will fundamentally change the post-imperial alignment of British foreign policy.

An Excess Of Optimism

Push aside all the rhetoric and there is a policy issue unaddressed by either Party. Brown is an optimist that multilateral engagement can deal with global problems. All progressives have to be optimists. But there is another point of view unrepresented outside the nationalist right and europhile centre.

This is that the UK is taking on far too much. The programme of action proposed by the 'Establishment' (if we can call the broadly unified internationalist stance of both main parties by that name) is massive and far beyond the future ability of the British State to finance or to organise.

Multilateralism is, in this context, not an option but a necessity. The British State is brokering its historic leading position as nuclear power and voting member of the Security Council in a race against time for the day when it must inevitably drift into the second rank of powers.

Whether finally integrated into the US-led West or into the German-led EU or some preferred hybrid, by the time that China, Brazil, Russia and India find their post-recovery feet, the UK will be a province in the world system - Greece to some Rome, if only in its own estimation.

If you have a global vision (as Blair, Brown, Miliband and the Kinnocks have), the current Government represents the one shot at the future that British liberal internationalists must take and leave as a legacy to the centre-left of the wider European Union.

It is a self-consciously Gramscian pitch at ideological hegemony over a system that others will soon control in full. It is the reason for the recent fuss over Blair and Miliband's role in Europe. Although interpreted as rats leaving the sinking ship, they were only looking for a higher command.

But is this in the British national interest or is it a pitch to do universal good from ideologues that is being offered at the expense of the people who actually live within the United Kingdom?

The Nationalist Riposte & The City of London

The Conservative version of events, which may contribute to their victory, is that current general policy lines are appropriate but must be handled not from an idealistic perspective but from a pragmatic and realistic perspective. This means, of course, from the perspective of the economic dominance of the City.

This is not so different from New Labour, merely a shift of emphasis. New Labour has been committed to London as global City because it is the cash-cow for redistribution. The Tories are merely committed to it as a source of national wealth and power in its own right.

But the growing dissident perspective, fuelling libertarian, fascist and nationalist protest on the Right and liberal and even neo-Marxist protest on the Left, is that this is just not good enough.

The problem here is the very fact of globalisation and the sense that it may be producing diminishing returns and destabilising the nation. London has one third of its population born outside the UK and its economy increasingly dominates a national hinterland that has become drug-dependent on it.

It is like a hamster's treadmill - London works harder and harder to supply funds for a growing class of persons who may be unemployable, a rather meaty public sector employing 6 million people and the aspirations of a State that is expending geld in foreign policy adventures to assert its right to lead.

Meanwhile, this economic system draws in migrants who, bluntly, are degrading the old social democratic welfare system, demand (and are given) equal rights that diminish the opportunities of the weakest members of the indigenous community and build voting blocs for the new establishment.

Add to this that foreign policy (the Israel lobby is not the only one in play) is being guided by special voting blocs within urban areas, then 'ressentiment' is to be expected.

What Happens If The City Falters

But what happens when the City of London falters (as it has done recently). Current plans are predicated on the City recovering. The whole cycle then starts agaim. Yet there must be a limit to London being more innovative than clever Chinese bankers or to the physical number of migrants.

The Liberal Democrat solution is the effective transfer of sovereignty to a European Super-State that can handle the problems of faltering bits of itself. The experience of Iceland has badly shaken a lot of 'small nation' proponents and made the EU a more credible fall-back.

The nationalists of the Left and Right (not necessarily racist by any means) and possibly some Greens increasingly tend either to a fantasy of England (in particular) as some giant sovereign Singapore (which still does not deal with the problem of the City's dominance over the wider economy) or as autarky.

Autarky, not a serious proposition in its pure form given national food and energy dependency let alone the UK's intense integration into the global financial system, means less people with even less goods and services. Social cohesion could fall to post-Yugoslavian levels.

Does the UK push for an honoured position as global leader in order to secure the City's (and various innovative industries') pre-eminence, for as many economic cycles as the system will bear, or does it prepare for a City crash that has no recovery. The sensible approach would be to do a little of both.

This would suggest an international role that is centred on good trading relations with old and new centres of capital (where the Tories might be more realistic than New Labour) but build in a dynamic plan for infrastructural investment and social management to ensure national survival as conditions change.

In this last respect, New Labour seems to be offering us such a plan with its johnny-come-lately strategy of investment in nuclear power (supported by the Tories), gas reserves, transport, education and digital networks but it is doing so just as the country is facing the most serious fiscal crisis since the 1930s.

The Post-Imperial Crisis

We have to look back to the 1930s to get some context for what is happening and what is at stake. The UK's crisis then was primarily one of trade depression but it was not helped by the fact that the British Empire, in terms of costs to the taxpayer, was a net cost.

This was masked by the Second World War where national mobilisation created a temporary socialist economy. But war and empire are very expensive to run. The assets of Britain were effectively handed over to the de facto control of our US ally under a neo-colonial arrangement embedded by the 1960s.

The Suez crisis had proved that we could no longer stand alone and the Conservative Government unravelled the Empire (South Asia already having been disposed of) to the point where it had ceased to exist barring a few outposts and a troubled corner of Ireland by the 1970s.

The reconstruction of the British economy on the back of globalisation was a major achievement, based on a gamble, but it has created an air of hubris within the Establishment, epitomised by the return South of the Sahara and East of Suez of the former Prime Minister.

The current economic crisis is probably far more critical to the UK than anyone has yet realised. There is no dividend to be had from unravelling an empire or from unleashing entrepreneurial creativity. There is total dependence on a recovery in the global economy over which the British have little practical say.

The recovery will come but it is almost certainly going to be insufficient to deal with the pent-up demands for welfare in an over-populated country with a growing under-class (now represented by its own reactionary political party) facing off the liberal wealthy and urban minority groups.

The 'race against time' approach of New Labour may now be too dangerous. A colder and more realistic Tory 'national interest' view may now be required and yet the Tories are likely to take no major action where it really matters - a plan to diversify the national economy and reduce its vulnerabilities.

The next election will solve nothing in itself. We may have to wait another electoral cycle for a viable national survival policy or accept full integration into the European Project and the transfer of our voice, finally and without return, to Brussels.