Six months ago, my good friend the former Prime Minister Sir John Major caused a stir. He argued that Britain should abandon any remaining delusions about our place in the world. He attacked complacency and nostalgia as routes to national decline:
“We are no longer a great power. We will never be so again. We are a top second-rank power”.
The government’s answer came in March with its Integrated Review, the five-yearly analysis of the threats to our country and the policies to deal with them. Its tone certainly wasn’t defeatist. On the contrary the review was the first serious attempt at defining “global Britain” after the trauma of Brexit. It set out an ambitious programme of re-engagement with every continent of the world, deploying hard and soft power in a relentless focus on a competitive future, especially in science and technology.
Of course, the Review was profoundly affected by Covid. What we now call “geo-economic security” lies at the heart of it: never again should we be exposed to fragile supply chains, dependent on importing surgical gowns, face masks and ventilators from the other side of the world. The lesson lay in our own capabilities, life-saving biopharma and genome sequencing.
From now on the government plans to identify, prioritise and invest in more national capabilities – from biosecurity to artificial intelligence, space technology to advanced warship building. And so do our competitors – allies and adversaries alike. Huge increases in security spending – on both hard and smart power – in countries like India, China, Australia and indeed Britain – are a new kind of protectionism, putting national resilience ahead of free trade and competition on price.
That sea-change in outlook has two important implications for us and the other major democracies. First, we will see a much closer relationship between government and industry. Already the UK Government is investing in the newest technologies through its Advanced Research and Invention Agency, with a £800 million budget over five years. We have spent another half a billion dollars buying OneWeb, which competes in the lower-level satellite market against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
A National Security Strategic Investment Fund will invest alongside normal markets
in new “dual-use” advanced technologies. Growing our science and technology power
“requires strategic choices and decisions.” The Government wants to back winners again.
Second, stronger resilience will involve us all. There will be a “whole of society” approach. That means closer working with senior managers of key infrastructure, services and systems; regular exercises and testing to improve local resilience, whether it is food supply, healthcare or energy; greater use of the military here in the UK, with plans for a “civilian reservist cadre” to back them up in time of crisis. Countries like Sweden, Israel and the Czech Republic already carry out large-scale resilience exercises and require their citizens to be involved.
But Covid has done something else: it has made policy-makers, and business too, look further and faster into the future. Developments in digitisation and quantum technology that might have taken a decade to go mainstream are now becoming standard today. Advances in science and technology, once the preserve and pride of academia, are now an important metric of competitive global power, conferring strategic economic and military advantage on leading tech nations and their companies.
Of course, this benefits us as consumers and customers. But it also complicates the task of maintaining the rules-based international order. Already the treaties and conventions
by which countries dealt with each other were breaking down. After the end of the Cold
War Russia committed not to store or develop chemical weapons: now it uses them to try to murder its own citizens. China signed the Law of the Sea Convention but refuses to abide by court rulings on the South China Sea. President Trump actively undermined the World Trade and World Health organisations.
Democracies will have to strengthen these conventions, making them more robust against newer threats to free societies. The world expects Britain and our allies to help draft new global rules for cyberspace and data privacy, and to counter China’s ambition to build the first sovereign digital currency, challenging western payment systems (China’s State Council decreed last year that “the five key means of production are: land, labour, capital, technology and data”).
There is no need for either complacency or fear about the future. Britain should not
be a bit-part player. I’m proud that we are one of only four countries in the world with new aircraft carriers. But we should be prouder still of our values, of our brainpower, whether it is our academic research, our biopharma or our financial know-how (look how all that came together in the vaccination programme), and of our international leadership in the G7, UN Security Council and Commonwealth.
Second-rank? Not yet
