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.

Foreign Office mandarins are getting increasingly concerned at the Conservatives' approach to Europe. The Tories may not be as extreme as UKIP but they are definitely eurosceptic.

The FCO has been staffed at its highest level, increasingly so since the 1970s, by mandarins who have been committed in varying measures to atlanticism and europeanism but definitely not to nationalism.

The FCO has not ‘got it’

William Hague appears to be suggesting that the Tory model of the world is less one of a Washington-London-Brussels axis and more one of London operating equally in its relationship to Washington, Brussels, the Commonwealth, Beijing and Moscow.

This is code for a national interest position, much as one might expect from the author of a well regarded biography of William Pitt the Younger.

Both major parties are atlanticist but New Labour became more european as part of its internal ‘reform’ process in the late 1980s and 1990s. New Labour is perfectly amenable from an FCO perspective except perhaps insofar as it went a little bit overboard in its atlanticism under Blair.

Arabists were soured and angered by what they saw as poodledom but this does not mean that they understood that the UK cannot afford to play a role east of Suez and south of the Sahara, only that they thought that the British had their own interests in the region distinct from the US imperium.

The FCO still assumes that being ‘big’ in the world is a good thing in itself – we suppose that this comes with the job description. 'Gloire' still plays its glamorous and magical role on the powerful.

Yet, while the UK does not have the secure economic basis to play with the ‘big boys’ in a multi-polar world in the long term, this does not mean that it has to roll itself under other sovereign interests, whether these be the US or the incipient European State, in order to be noticed.

The problem for diplomats is that the UK has no real and immediate enemies except those that it makes for itself. If there is no enemy, no threat to defend against, foreign policy tends to over-emphasise prestige alongside more material interests.

The UK's worst current scenario is that some atrocity monger might be let into the country through the same excessively porous borders that are required by its commitment to globalisation, a commitment  central to FCO thinking. Building an entire foreign policy on a bunch of criminals is scarcely impressive.

Of course, our ‘natural enemy’ alternates between anything trying to grab hegemony in Europe (in which case we have alliances with Russia) - or Russia in competition for control of spheres of influence outside Europe.

If you are wandering around the world trying to develop a new post-imperial status based on trade, soft power, values and other forms of influence (a model in which the British Council and BBC World Service are useful work horses) then trade and Russia come to be the only justifications for expenditure.

Russia (although increasingly replaced for some absurd reason by Iran) has almost become institutionalised as a threat, as if our policy-makers need something like Moscow to centre themselves upon and keep Europe off the list.

This misses the point. Russia is only a problem if you think that resisting the imposition of our values overseas makes another country into an enemy. A bigger threat may well lie in the European Union, a project much nearer to home that threatens some core values at home.

The Commitment to Europe

If your model is one of strengthening the British nation state within its own natural sphere of action (effectively Atlantic and the European Continent), then Russia is irrelevant so long as it is not tempted to return to its East European stamping grounds.

Russia, historically, has merely filled a vacuum when these occur (after Napoleon and after Hitler). The threat otherwise for the UK is more obviously a strong Europe that might impose its values and economic authority on the UK’s populous offshore islands.

From this perspective, the rational strategy is the one that appears to have dominated British thinking since Edward Heath bounced the country into the European project:

• maintain the counterweight of the Atlantic Alliance
• seek to extend the Atlantic Alliance into Europe as a restraint on excessive Europeanism
• keep the European Union as primarily a values and economics project
• extend it to the East to keep the Russian bear from seeking to fill that vacuum.

The establishment could rally around this (even the Arabists) because:

• it encompassed the so-called ‘special relationship’ (eventually degraded into poodledom)
• it allowed old warriors who remembered the Crimea and the Great Game (Stalin being a mere interlude) to maintain their sniffy attitude towards Moscow
• it gave ‘Albion perfide’ a chance to manage Europe into becoming an over-extended free trade zone based on liberal democracy – a continent of grocers as Napoleon might have termed it.

This system reached its apogee with Tony Blair who internalised and implemented this grand strategic vision of ‘partnership’ with the old white empire, but this time to 'do good' in the world, to exert influence over the little brown brothers and create a new 'Europe of the West' in a multi-polar world.

The UK would thus be primus inter pares because of its influence with the US - whether the Germans and French liked it or not. The US card thus became the trump in a massive game of diplomatic poker. This is, as we will see, Britain's 'grande illusion'.

This system has crumbled in the space of two years as if some tipping point has created an extended Suez. Of course, the central event is the economic crisis which has not only weakened the UK but has raised major questions about the liberal economic model.

What Has Changed

The European instinct is anti-Keynesian, disciplined, corporatist, conservative and regulatory – everything that the UK and the City of London fears as a global trading centre. Europe was being seduced into the Anglo-American economic model just as it folded.

At this moment, the Government is not fighting for British interests so much as arbitrating between British interests and the European regulatory drive. But other factors have opened up the contradictions and problems within the British grand project.

The election of Obama has created a new vision of American foreign policy that is not particularly interested in the aspirations of the British and sees it even more openly as a disposable tool that is only interesting as a means of influence within Europe.

The utter failure of the UK to get European engagement in Afghanistan and the fact that Iran is using the UK as its whipping boy in making its claims of subversion in order to maintain a dialogue with the US, indicates just how shallow is the special relationship claimed by Blair in practice.

Meanwhile, the European Project cannot just stand still. The Lisbon Treaty creates a new model of the European Union that will lead ineluctably, if it does not implode from within, to a United States of Europe in all but name.

Once the Lisbon Treaty has passed, the machinery is in place for a process of federalisation analogous to that which crushed any resistance to authority in the US and which still continues in the war on organised crime. More powers will be directed to the centre to solve pressing problems as they arise.

The economic crisis under conditions of non-implementation of the Lisbon Treaty has meant that there has been no effective co-ordinated response but it has also increased the sense within the core of the EU that there have to be co-ordinated responses in future.

Such responses will not be liberal but corporatist – or, rather, they will represent a conservative capitalism intended to ensure social cohesion. The message should be clear – the post-Lisbon world, which New Labour has so enthusiastically embraced, could transform British culture.

All this may not have mattered if New Labour had held on to the confidence of the British people. New Labour can adjust to these new conditions, but only by shifting to a more European Socialist model in which it embraces corporatism.

Such a strategy might have been achieved through its coalition of interests – the outlying less prosperous regions, organised labour and the public sector. Lord Mandelson may yet effect this trick. There is a strange public trust in him – as one might in Machiavelli – a trust in his competence.

The Fact of the English

But New Labour is on just 25% of the vote. Many of its senior members are running like rats from a sinking ship.

Much of the public that will not vote for it actually hates it for many reasons – its perceived murderous foreign policy, its failure to deliver social change, the perception of incompetence, the perception of deception, the perception of incompetent deception and of deceptive incompetence.

The English (still the majority group within the UK), regardless of the opinions of the Celts and the migrant minorities, where they have not adopted the dying collectivist culture of the labour movement or are not nicely embedded in the comfort of the public sector, are nationalist, libertarian and stubborn.

They moan and they withdraw rather than fight, or only fight under conditions that would have had Americans reach for their guns and Europeans out on to the streets, but many of them do vote – and herein lies the problem for the Establishment.

The Establishment treats democracy as a useful fiction – a means of gaining legitimacy for the circulation of elites who compete for office while the infrastructure of the State continues regardless. Elected Government makes a difference to the direction of policy but within a framework dictated by history.

The whole point of politicians (in the eyes of the Establishment) is not to exert the people’s will on them, but to mediate between the people and the State so that the State can get on with the job at hand.

Neither the political class not the Establishment have been much worried in the last three decades by the loss of a link between actual votes and legitimacy. In the 1960s, the two main parties’ seats would equate approximately to their vote because they were a duopoly.

Since then, first, the return of the Liberal Democrats and the rise of Celtic nationalisms and, now, the emergence of neo-nationalism have thrown everything up in the air. The public is angry and the main political parties need to re-establish both connection and legitimacy.

In June, in the wake of scandal affecting this intermediary political class and in the midst of economic crisis, nationalist votes drifted from New Labour into the BNP and libertarian and nationalist votes drifted more heavily from the Conservatives to UKIP.

The Conservatives are assumed to be the next Government but this is not a fully correct assumption. The patterns of voting within the First Past The Post system could come up with results that are nothing like the popular vote. The Tories cannot afford to be complacent.

The Problem of the Tories

For New Labour, this is largely a matter of re-connecting with their core social base. This helps to explain their sudden rather late interest in care for the elderly and in social mobility.

Re-connection has to be established at the Party Conference and then reformulated as an appeal to solidarity - to limit the damage and, at best, retain office and, at worst, ensure that New Labour is re-established as the UK’s second party and not wiped out altogether.

For the Conservatives, the matter is more complicated. They have a strategy that has served them well over many centuries. 

Ever since Sir Robert Peel, the Tories have understood that they way to dish the Whigs, the best term for the succession of challenges to the propertied that have emerged over three hundred years, is to appeal to the mob and to detach sections of the other side and embrace them.

For Cameron, as an Old Etonian ‘toff’ surrounded by similar social types – a Leader more in the model of Balfour and Douglas-Home than of Heath or Major – the art is to embrace the best of the public sector and re-build the party in the regions

But he also recognises that he cannot afford to lose traditional voters on Europe or on economic liberty to UKIP. This brings us back to Establishment nervousness. The Establishment wants full engagement in Europe in order to manage it. To eurosceptics (or 'euro-realists'), this is not a strategy, it is a sell-out.

Moreover, there are signs that many Europeans who are equally euro-realist are looking to the UK for leadership. The old guard cannot understand why Cameron – a social liberal at home by Tory standards – has allied himself with the ‘worst sort’ of neo-nationalist in Strasbourg.

Big business is also unnerved, as Sir Ken Clarke’s intervention this week suggests, not only by the fear that the Tories might seek to increase corporate taxation to limit the economic crisis’ effects on the public but that it might compromise on liberal economic values in Europe.

This latter is unlikely but there is a split between the interests of very big business, seeking to manage policy through one centre of power in Brussels, and the City and mid-sized and smaller businesses’ interest in keeping regulation to a bare minimum.

“I Say, Old Chap”

The Tories are only doing their job, intermediaries between the State and the People, as a political party. Like all politicians, they speak with forked tongue. They are not withdrawalist on Europe and they will accept the Lisbon Treaty if they can get away with it.

However, for the sake of rebuilding the Tory coalition, they are quite prepared to put Lisbon to a referendum that might be lost and they will be an often obstructive and obstreperous member of the community on matters of ‘interest’ because that is what the English want.

An honest Tory speaking to a Permanent Secretary in his Club would say,

“Listen, old boy, you leave us to do your job and we’ll do ours. New Labour has completely disconnected the English heartland from the State and we are going to have enough of a problem worrying about keeping the Celts and inner cities on board without worrying about a disconnected enemy within.

“These are our people and they feel aggrieved. We can no longer give them a nice little imperial war to distract them, so we need to speak to their national pride and dislike of regulation and state interference for a while, possibly a long while. Live with it.

"The Europeans are going to have to live with it too. It’s your job to get what you can out of the Europeans for our people. It’s my job to keep the people off your backs while you do it.”

The Establishment will, of course, not give up without a fight. Cameron is working with his own members against much of his Party elite.

Clarke has already spoken out. The European Parliamentarians certainly don’t like it. Rifkind has suggested merging our nuclear deterrent with that of the French to create a European strike capability in all but name.

What they are all doing now is merely trying to tone down the rhetoric just in case it is used as a bargaining tool against British interests in current negotiations on security and economic matters.

Poodledom and Power

There is one foot note to this. An unnamed senior diplomat reported in the Financial Times has, with consummate arrogance, revealed the Establishment’s trump card and reminded us that the role of ‘poodle’ is a conscious expression of State policy and not just an accident of politicians.

His expressed view is that the Tories will come into line on Europe because the US will command them to be fully engaged. We think this senior diplomat is naïve as well as arrogant.

The Atlantic alliance is as critical to the Tories as it was when Churchill constructed it as a first line of defence in the 1940s, but the re-evaluation around Cameron’s and Hague’s circle of the degree to which the UK must be commanded in security matters has been under-estimated.

Our prediction is that the ‘national pride’ element within the Tory Party will assert its Atlantic commitment but on terms closer to those of Harold Wilson rather than Tony Blair.

America will get most of what it wants but what it will no longer get, if the Tories come to power, is that blind loyalty that leads to imbroglios like Iraq and Afghanistan or the loss of sovereignty in supra-national institutions that works against core national interests.

The tension between the Tories and the Establishment over foreign policy is essentially one of what we mean by ‘national interest’.

To the Establishment it still means the Crown, the British word for State – an organism of continuity with a dynastic origin but run by a board of management of bureaucrats that weighs up national needs in terms of Thucydides’ primary concerns of all diplomats: fear of the other, prestige and material interest.

To the Tories, the balance between State and People has been lost under New Labour, As a political party, the Tories are far more interested in building a solid coalition that must appeal to British-English values, pride and livelihoods. They are right. These are the 'real' national interest.

It is one of the sadnesses of the British centre-left that it failed to be mediator between State and People for the first time in its history and that it chose a lawyer like Blair to lead New Labour as nothing more than an arm of the State. Its recovery, consequently, may now take a generation.

www.tppr.co.uk

www.pendrywhite.com

If you want to follow TPPR events and commentary, try http://twitter.com/TPPRNews

If you want to follow Pendry White events and commentary, try http://twitter.com/PendryWhite