Post Segments
Dear Subscribers,
This week on BfB, former British diplomat Adrian Hill analyses how ongoing cuts to the Royal Navy since the early 1960s have left it too depleted to guarantee the security on which much of our daily life depends. The head of the Royal Navy himself sounded many of the same warnings in an important speech of his own. We also continue to monitor the threats posed by the EU Reset, and examine the prospect of Canada becoming an ‘associate member’ of the EU, which should be seen in the context of Mark Carney’s commitment to a transformed international order earlier this year in Davos.
New on BfB: A Navy Too Small for a Dangerous World by Adrian Hill
We are living through the most dangerous geopolitical era since the end of the Cold War, and the Royal Navy that must protect us is stretched to breaking point. Former British diplomat Adrian Hill shows how governments of both parties have hollowed out the fleet in peacetime since the early 1960s, resulting in a navy so depleted that the security of many aspects of our daily lives is under threat. Hill suggests that the advent of AI in shipbuilding presents a possible means of rebuilding the fleet, but only if the government is willing to make the necessary investment.
On the same day that we published Hill’s piece, many of his warnings were echoed by no less a figure than the head of the Royal Navy himself, First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, in a speech at Admiralty House. The First Sea Lord pointed to the threat that an increasingly brazen Russia poses to the UK’s critical undersea infrastructure — which carries many of the services on which modern societies depend, including telecommunications, the internet, and financial transactions — revealing that, on average, two Royal Navy warships are deployed every week to monitor Russian naval vessels attempting to map it: ‘We know that Russia is probing us for weakness. And we are facing threats in a way we have not been since the Cold War.’
What is at stake in an EU Reset deal
Following her detailed analysis published on BfB last week, Catherine McBride has further explained, on the New Culture Forum podcast, how an EU Reset deal threatens British sovereignty. Her case is reinforced by David Collins, professor of international economic law at City University, who warns that any such deal would be one-sided, including a requirement that Britain adopt the EU’s carbon-border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) which ‘risks exposing the UK to retaliation from its existing trade partners’. The EU Reset, in short, amounts to Britain handing over large chunks of economic sovereignty to the EU for little discernible benefit, and is fraught with risks.
Will Canada become the EU’s inaugural ‘associate member’?
‘But above all, dear Mark, Europe and Canada believe in democracy, that power does not belong to the strongest, richest, and loudest, but to all of us.’ So went Ms von der Leyen’s appeal to Canadian ‘associate membership’ of the EU this week. ‘Dear’ Mark Carney has welcomed these overtures, responding with a statement of Canada’s own ‘commitment to the rule of law, as well as our unwavering defence of human dignity, individual freedom and democracy’.
‘Democracy’ here symbolises a virtuous, cosmopolitan position that is seeking a middle way between Trumpian vulgarity and Chinese or Russian barbarity. It follows Carney’s speech at Davos that diagnosed ‘a rupture in the world order’, of which the collapse of ‘the international rules-based order’ was a symptom. Carney claimed to be presenting a picture of international politics which avoided ‘nostalgia’ and recognised the ‘intensif[ication] [of] great power rivalry’.
Carney was pointing at a future in which the crudeness of great power politics gives way to the ‘more just’ dealings ‘of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation.’ ‘This is Canada’s path’ — one which Ms von der Leyen’s Europe might seem to have opened.
And yet, as James Crisp reports for The Daily Telegraph, EU diplomats seem less sure. One is quoted as saying that ‘associate member is an empty phrase’; another says that this democratic alliance is an ‘unfortunate proposal, which has never been discussed with member states’. In fact, Carney has disclaimed talk of ‘full EU membership’ and talks instead of an ‘alliance for the future’. It would seem that in this instance, Ms von der Leyen’s reach may have exceeded the EU’s grasp.
What we’re reading:
Daniel Hannan for The Daily Telegraph: The true ‘special relationship’ is between Britain and Canada
At the end of the 1920s, the Canadian press baron Lord Beaverbrook launched his campaign, or crusade (which survives as the Daily Express’s emblem), for ‘Empire Free Trade’ which proposed making the British Empire a free trade bloc. It did not go very far, as the Depression and Keynesianism discredited liberal economic theory. But a century later something similar has resurfaced in the albeit crude acronym of ‘CANZUK’, which sounds like a term of abuse. Its leading advocate is Lord Hannan, who offers it as an alternative for conservatives who can neither bear the EU nor rely on, or bear, Trump.
Hannan sees Canada as a surrogate England. His basis for doing so is an institutional, and therefore politico-cultural, resemblance. It follows for Hannan that because ‘our institutions had taught us to think similarly…we tended to respond the same way to international crises.’ A common response in this view is desirable, and here Hannan adopts the anti-Trumpian view of the international political order as voiced by Carney.
Hannan’s response, however, is to seek an alliance with Canada, as opposed to the EU, which most Rejoiners would prefer. Hannan believes that Britain and Canada have a distinctive political tradition in common, in a way in which Britain and the EU never really did. This could, and Hannan insists ought to, form the basis of a post-Brexit foreign policy.
