Yet somehow the perception is that nostalgia is the sole province of xenophobes. Well “newsflash”, as we used to say. Those of us on the Left also become more nostalgic as we get older. We too mourn the past. So, at a time of mounting scepticism about the public finance model for our denationalised industries, I commend this bible of calm rationalism: the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual.

The Manual, like the actual Bible, doesn’t need to be read linearly. It’s best experienced immersively, as a trove of browsable scripture. Oh, spoiler alert: both British Rail and the Bible end badly. One in terrifying madness, with everything destroyed by rapacious monsters, the other in a poorly-written Book of Revelation.

The Manual is a beautiful, heartbreaking anthology of design guides issued by BR between 1965 and 1970, the coolest and most swinging period in our modern social history. We had a proper Old Labour government, for a start. We had the Pill and the Mini and rising wages thanks to strong unions headed by people who sounded like us. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was groovy heaven. The Beatles were turning us on, reinventing the future, in those long summery five years from Rubber Soul to Let It Be. The Open University was launched, decades before the internet made remote learning universally dull. Brutalist masterpieces redefined civic space and, along with atheism and cohabitation and drugs and whatnot, it really irritated older people, which made everything so much funnier.

We were a railway household in those days. My dad started as a fitter with British Railways after the war, and ended up working at British Rail’s new-look Euston during its modernisation. He revered The Euston Concourse as others revere St Peter’s Square; VIPs using the same space as the proles. I remember with affection Euston’s pristine egalitarian public space, yet to be slathered in shrieking adverts, yet to succumb to the inevitable rash of franchise buboes. God, I can even remember when the toilets were free.

We were passengers then, not customers. Passenger traffic, not just technical modernisation, drove the new-look BR. For the first time in the history of British railways, passengers had replaced freight as the main source of business; the company had to present itself as a legible, people-centred organisation. How refreshing it all seems today, when a privatised industry treats passengers as freight.

Also — nostalgia klaxon — it’s worth remembering that we weren’t “in Europe” at the time. BR’s assertive corporate identity was a cheerfully patriotic act. Tony Howard, former Head of Design for British Rail, was rightly proud of bringing sleek coherence to a post-Beeching railway system employing an army of 400,000 employees. “The Manual was designed to be a working tool,” he said. “It set the standard for how large corporate identities are implemented but more importantly how they are controlled”. Oh yeah, national identity, taking back control, wasn’t that a thing recently? Seriously, how come we’ve Brexited into a reality where two-thirds of the public support renationalisation yet 70% of our rail companies are currently owned by European states?

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The re-creation of the Manual was a recent labour of love by graphic artist Wallace Henning, who assembled all these volumes of meticulous ring-bound sheets of corporate guidelines — the branding, livery, uniforms, minutiae and miscellany — initially via Kickstarter. Gathered together in a single book, they add up to more than just a quaint historical document. There’s something so utterly confident, so obliteratingly modern about the typefaces, fonts, logos and signage, even if sometimes the typographic notes sound a bit Mervyn Peake — “Where it is impossible to obtain typefaces of the Univers range the following are acceptable alternatives for text setting: Monotype Grotesque 215, Grotesque Bold 216, and Haas Type Foundary’s Neue Haas Grotesque Medium…” Gerald Barney’s iconic double-arrow logo, literally drawn on the back of an envelope on the Tube in to work, is everywhere. And very precisely commanded: “Note that the outer arrows broaden slightly towards their tips. If incorrectly drawn parallel they appear to taper outwards.” Like entasis in Classical architecture, where they fattened columns a bit in the middle to correct an optical illusion.

And oh my word ladies and gents, the Sixties uniforms. My mates and I may have been mincing about in ridiculous jumble-sale clothes on the last train home from Southend Victoria, but in the real world of public-sector service, British Rail staff looked sharp. The guards and train drivers in their worsted serge with silver buttons are the very picture of amiable Stalinism. As for the illustration of the female courier’s uniform, and the female courier within, well. She looks as impossibly chic to me now as she would have looked to me then, in her tailored jacket in worsted fine twill with semi-fit front, straight back and side hacking vents, flared skirt just above the knee, white poplin blouse finished with a kite-shaped cravat, and the sense behind that modest gaze of someone who reads Harold Robbins novels. Pretty sure I never encountered a British Rail courier; I would definitely have remembered.

When the Manual appeared in 2016 it was an instant hit with graphics geeks and font fetishists. I lack the technical expertise to appreciate it fully on those terms. For me, it’s a wormhole to a period I experienced as a teenager, when I could only gaze at the British Rail Catering Menu on Liverpool Street station and dream of a Tartan Plate for seven shillings and sixpence (“Entrecôte steak, fried egg, tomato, chips, roll and butter”). Or when, boarding a train, I’d scan the carriage windows for those clear of “No Smoking” or “Ladies Only” stickers. The new corporate identity offered a public domain of clarity, guiding us through a world of Newspapers, Cigarettes and Sweets. The signage and pictograms remain of course, like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. The rest is dust on the wind. Honestly, I wish I could remember being on a train back then and luxuriating in the knowledge that it was publicly owned. All I can remember is taking it for granted, which in a way I suppose is how we lost it. The last updates to the guidelines seem to have been issued in 1979-80, when it all still looked just as modern as it did in 1965. After 1979, for obvious reasons, our nationalised railway’s days were numbered.

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As a book recommendation, the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual is, I concede, a far cry from Ulysses, that go-to, must-read Citizen Kane of books. Except weirdly the two books do have a resonance. “If Dublin were to be destroyed,” Joyce once drawled, rather grandly, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.” It’s a glorious thought that we may one day awake from the paralysing hypnosis of battery-capitalism voodoo and say wait, where are we, what is this shit, is our public realm really best managed by succulent perma-tanned pirates with off-shore fortunes and excellent government contacts? Or indeed by other country’s governments?

And we will say to ourselves, no. No, it bloody well isn’t. And if we ever did decide to take back control and have a regulated, accountable, affordable public transport system, here’s a blueprint for what a railway should look like. Modern. Stylish. Ours.

The overall context of the Review is that of a global system marked by China’s rise and its corollary, America’s decline. Like Ham in Genesis ashamed by his father Noah’s nakedness, the British defence establishment finds the stark facts of American decline too shameful to face directly. Though American decline is referred to only obliquely through the polite euphemism of “a more competitive and multipolar world”, its consequences are the thread which runs through the entire review. 

It acknowledges that China’s growing international stature is by far the most significant geopolitical factor in the world today, “with major implications for British values and interests and for the structure and shape of the international order”. And with archetypal British understatement, it adds that “the fact that China is an authoritarian state, with different values to ours, presents challenges for the UK and our allies”.

While Russia is described as “the most acute threat to the UK” on our continent, it is China that threatens to overturn our strategic world. Addressing the hard facts of China’s rise squarely, the Review observes that “the international order is more fragmented, characterised by intensifying competition between states over interests, norms and values”. A defence of the status quo, it insists, “is no longer sufficient for the decade ahead”, and a strategic tilt towards the Indo Pacific is outlined.

Justifying Britain’s much-vaunted tilt, the Review observes that China’s rise is now the engine of world history: “by 2030, it is likely that the world will have moved further towards multipolarity, with the geopolitical and economic centre of gravity moving eastward towards the Indo-Pacific”. And it describes China’s increasing power and international assertiveness as “the most significant geopolitical factor of the 2020s”. 

Yet the nature and intensity of Britain’s new Indo-Pacific tilt seems less marked than either its proponents were urging or its detractors cautioning against. As much as China is Britain’s greatest strategic challenge, the Review also welcomes continued Chinese investment in the British economy, and commits to engaging with China on climate change, while promising action to prevent British vulnerability to Chinese economic pressure, and urging the construction of a new diplomatic framework to manage the increasingly tense relationship. In all this, the Review strikes a cautious and sensible middle ground between confrontation and engagement.

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In reality, it is not vastly different to the much-criticised EU trade agreement with China asserting much the same things. We are more rhetorically opposed to China’s human rights abuses than the EU is, and it is right that the Review seeks to “ensure that British organisations are neither complicit in nor profiting from them”, while remaining realistic enough not to promise we can prevent them. Indeed, it does not commit Britain to any concrete goals to contain China’s rise other than in the vaguest terms — there is no commitment to defend Taiwan, for example, which given America’s growing anxieties over its own ability to do so, is only sensible.

Nevertheless, for all that the world is reorienting itself around China, the Review reaffirms the strategic centrality of the Special Relationship to Britain, situating the transatlantic alliance in the realm of eternal values as well as hard power. It claims that “the heart of the relationship is a human one: the flow of people and ideas between our countries, our shared history, and a common language”, and “also one of common values – a shared belief in democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms”. If any thought has been given to how America’s political ferment might lead to a divergence in our common values or interests, as our closest European allies are now finding, the Review gives no space to such considerations.

Indeed, in its commitment to preserving an open world system of free trade and purported “universal values”, the Review leads Britain into the 21st century committed — at least rhetorically — to the defence of 19th-century liberalism. A markedly Whig document, it asserts that we will “support open societies – characterised by effective governance and resilience at home, and which cooperate with other countries on the basis of transparency, good governance and open markets” with the intention to “shape an open, resilient global economy, restoring trust in free and fair trade”. The emphasis on, or at least aspiration towards, free trade is indeed one of the central planks of the review, which asserts that “the UK’s openness to the flow of trade, capital, data, ideas and talent is essential to our long-term prosperity”.

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This may not reflect the realities of a rapidly deglobalising international system — or the scepticism of British voters — yet a degree of realism is permitted to intrude upon our aspirations. Much as we may wish to defend an open global economy, it cautions that more states will adopt economic statecraft as a lever in systemic competition,  involving “greater protectionism and economic nationalism” and “the deliberate use of economic tools … to target and undermine the economic and security interests of rivals”.

The sections on our military posture, including cuts to the numbers of jets and tanks have already grabbed headlines. But it is unclear how boosting our numbers of nuclear warheads will qualitatively enhance our security, other than deepening the defence relationship with the US and acting as an assertion that Britain still has teeth while we hurriedly rebuild our armed forces. Its promise that the Army will undertake a rapid modernisation programme, an urgent concern highlighted by the title of the recent Defence Committee paper on our armoured component, Obsolescent and Outgunned, is necessary, and should be carefully monitored following the Army’s manifold failings so far. 

The emphasis on training allies rather than committing to defend them with massed forces, on cyber warfare and the challenges and opportunities offered by the technological revolutions reshaping modern war are all sensible — and given our denuded military capabilities, perhaps as much a case of necessity as desire.

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There are other new and welcome elements: the pronounced emphasis on scientific research as well as its insistence that green energy is a matter of national security and economic growth. Also strong are the sections on increased focus on space, as well as action on climate change, mass migration and terrorism. Its commitment to an open global internet in the face of tech authoritarianism, however, is counterposed by a need to defend Britain from “disinformation” — the similarities with the restricted virtual spaces of rival powers may end up greater than anticipated.

High on lofty aspirations, short on detailed policy and maps, the cautious, sober document realistically outlines the challenges facing Britain — without overstating our capacity to prevent them. If a criticism could be made, it is that the Review commits the UK to managing the deleterious consequences of a globalised international system it pledges itself to defending. The first principles underlying Britain’s strategic posture are not questioned. The problem of managing divergence between the Atlantic alliance and an increasingly independent-minded EU is not addressed. Nor is the likelihood that China’s statist example will prove inspiring to disaffected political entrepreneurs at home, with the CCP remaining largely indifferent to the political enthusiasms of the outside world as long as wealth and power continues to flow its way.

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Perhaps the central, and so-far under-discussed claim that the Review makes, which underpins the choices it urges, is its assertion that in the new multipolar order, instead of a return to “Cold War-style blocs”,  the “influence of middle powers is likely to grow in the 2020s, particularly when they act together”. This immediately strikes the reader as a realistic outcome whose full implications are worthy of further consideration. This is the same analysis which drives the EU’s appreciation of a multipolar world as a strategic opportunity, though the policy choices Britain derives from this of cooperation between far-flung nation states, and not consolidation in a continental power bloc could not be more different. Which, if either, approach will prove to be the best bet can only be a matter of speculation.

The deepened strategic cooperation with France, Japan and Australia which the Review urges follows from this analysis, and offers the potential to enhance Britain’s place on the world stage. Though it frames these strategic decisions in terms of shared values (as it markedly does not when discussing Britain’s Middle Eastern alliances), this is a sensibly Realist appreciation of how to use shifting power dynamics to enhance Britain’s influence. Indeed, by underpinning its lofty rhetoric with a sober appreciation of the world as it actually is, the Review manages to balance the ethical and ideological impulses of international politics with a frank and cautious analysis of hard power. It can see Britain’s place in a dangerous and volatile new world, without over-promising our capacity to shape it. 

The subsequent attempt to remould Britain as a European power acting in concert with its continental neighbours through the European Union was an unhappy marriage, and has ended in a rancorous divorce whose final settlement is still to be determined. Adrift on the world stage, we are in need of good ideas.

Instead, we are offered CANZUK, a reheated Edwardian fantasy of a globe-spanning Anglosphere acting as a world power which excites the enthusiasm of a small coterie of neoliberal and neoconservative ideologues, if no one else.

In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, the historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts argued that the CANZUK nations — Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK — ought to establish “some form of federation among them” as a “second Anglospheric superpower” combining “free trade, free movement of people, a mutual defense organization and combined military capabilities” , which would “create a new global superpower and ally of the U.S., the great anchor of the Anglosphere”.

One cannot fault Roberts for the grandeur of his vision, even if the details of how this would actually work are left to others to fill in. Instead, we are reassured, this would not be a centralising project like the hated EU; rather,“its program for a loose confederal state linking the Westminster democracies would be clearly enunciated right from the start.” Already, we see the harsh hand of reality ready to crush this initially appealing vision. On the one hand, CANZUK is a globe-spanning superpower ready to be born; on the other, it is merely a loose grouping of separate national governments, which would, like all national governments, act according to their own interests above all. 

By totting up the different GDP figures of the various CANZUK nations, Roberts claims that his proposed Empire 2.0 “would have a combined GDP of more than $6 trillion, placing it behind only the U.S., China and the EU,” while “with a combined defense expenditure of over $100 billion, it would also be able to punch above its weight”.

Yet the flaws of this argument are obvious. As other critics have noted, only a minuscule proportion of the CANZUK nations’ trade is with each other, save New Zealand, an economic satellite of Australia. Australia is a great East Asian trading power, and will remain so. Canada is enmeshed in the greater North American trading sphere, as are we with Europe, whatever Brexiteers may wish. As always, the simple matter of geography trumps the affective bonds between far-flung kith and kin, whatever their emotional appeal. 

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As the political scientists Duncan Bell and Srdjan Vucetic note in a 2019 paper on the CANZUK project, sober analysis of the geographic facts underwriting trade patterns reveals “why Australian exports to Britain have for decades hovered below two percent of its total outgoing trade and why only for New Zealand would a CANZUK pact count as ‘the most important’” This, they note, partly “explains why during the Brexit campaign, the leaders of all of the CANZUK countries supported Britain remaining in the EU. They do not see the huge benefits professed by CANZUKers.”

In any case, what good would it do us if Australia sells huge quantities of raw materials to China, or Canada agricultural produce to America, if the UK exchequer doesn’t benefit from it? Would we share the same currency? Would there be a shared tax mechanism to convert this notional $6 trillion GDP into something meaningful? The issue is not even raised, let alone answered.

Yet the example of the EU already shows us the failure of economic union without political union; and of advancing a common foreign policy among nations with different interests. Without an overarching political and economic framework, the goal of uniting separate nations into one coherent geopolitical bloc cannot succeed; and even with one, as long as the interests of the component nations diverge, the long-term chances of success are slim. The only meaningful economic effect of a CANZUK free trade zone, surely, would be to wipe out what remains of British farming under tides of Canadian wheat, Australian beef and New Zealand lamb. 

On the strategic level, the MP Bob Seeley, in a report for the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society thinktank, proposes “a mutual defence clause, akin to NATO’s Article 5”. But on the matter of defence, again the stumbling block is not the individual fellow-feeling and affection shared between the Anglo-Saxon nations but the differing foreign policy goals of CANZUK’s constituent countries. Would Australia send jets to defend the North Sea from Russian incursions? Would avowedly anti-nuclear New Zealand, an essentially pacifist state with barely any armed forces to speak of, demand a place under the UK’s nuclear umbrella, or raise an army to defend Canada’s oil exploration rights in the high Arctic?

As Bell and Vucetic note, “it is illusory to think that an alliance with Britain would ever again become Australia’s main strategic priority, just as it is illusory to expect that Canada and the UK would re-orient their defence postures away from the Atlantic and towards the Asia-Pacific region.

Roberts claims that “Churchill would have approved” the CANZUK scheme, but his previous attempts at viewing foreign policy through a Churchillian lens have not been successful. On the wisdom of invading Iraq, I suspect not even the objects of his adulation would agree with his previous assertions that “history will prove George Bush right”, nor that Tony Blair’s “apotheosis” will come “when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam’s henchmen”.

But as a useful thought experiment in this mooted superpower’s foreign policy, what would the CANZUK position on invading Iraq have been anyway? Neither Canada nor New Zealand took part in the war, which they strongly opposed, judging that the invasion was not in their national interests. Perhaps a more useful Churchillian lesson would have been the Chanak Crisis of 1921, when Canada refused to follow Britain into war against Turkey to Churchill’s great disappointment, and which established the principle that the dominions would from then on follow their own independent foreign policies — a principle even more apparent now than it was a century ago. 

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More bold claims for a united CANZUK foreign policy have been offered recently by Matt Kilcoyne of the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, who argues that “common language, common political systems, common history, common sense of purpose, translate into a sheer force of fact re-emergence of a global role that has eluded the mandarins in the Foreign Office for far too long.” Explicitly echoing the civilisation-state rhetoric of China, Russia and Turkey, Kilcoyne claims that the CANZUK nations are themselves a civilisation-state, with that civilisation being globalised capitalism. “Our civilisation needs champions to save it from opponents and challengers abroad, but also nationalists at home,” he asserts (presumably referring to the voters who brought Johnson’s government to power), vowing that “we must defend the gains of globalisation for the whole of the world”. 

This is a vision of Anglo-Saxon civilisation purely reducible to swashbuckling free trade on the high seas previously made only by Napoleon or Oswald Spengler at their most cynical and dismissive, though here represented as a positive trait. Wrapping neoliberal economic goals within a narrative of derring-do and imperial nostalgia derived from Ladybird’s Adventures From History series may make a subset of middle-aged Brexiteers go weak at the knees, but a zealous adherence to free trade dogma does not make a civilisation, even if, as we are rapidly finding out, it may well break one.

If the argument is that doubling down on the economic theories which have done so much to destroy British manufacturing and boost Chinese power at the expense of the West will somehow restrain China’s growth, then it is self-evidently absurd. Having handed the world on a platter to China in pursuit of globalisation, we are now told to deepen globalisation to fight China. Far from an Anglospheric superpower, a CANZUK along these lines would be simply a transcontinental suicide pact.

As for what a united CANZUK foreign policy of confronting China would mean in practice, Kilcoyne cites the fact that “Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom joined the USA in condemning moves to shut down free and fair elections in Hong Kong this autumn”, as indeed they did; and if foreign policy were simply a question of co-signing petulant letters, no doubt CANZUK would indeed be a superpower.

However, foreign policy and grand strategy entails far more than this in the real world, and in the real world, the primary defence relationship of each CANZUK Nation is with the United States, and not with each other, and the primary focus of each nation is its own continental sphere. In defence as with trade, Britain remains a European power, Australia and New Zealand retain their focus on Asia, and Canada on North America and the Arctic: and these basic orientations will not change, whatever the dreams of a certain subset of Westminster thinktankers. 

A more limited argument in favour of enhanced cooperation among the CANZUK nations could reasonably be made — indeed, it is a common approach of the cheerleaders to elide support for their more realistic goals with that for their grander geostrategic fantasies.

Liberalisation of visa regulations among the CANZUK nations would no doubt be broadly popular; similarly, a more realistic proposal for diplomatic cooperation on the world stage between Britain, Canada and Australia has been put forward by the journalist Ben Judah. He correctly notes that New Zealand’s foreign policy does not chime with the others, as “Wellington is simply not in the same place as Ottawa, Canberra, or London when it comes to China”, and “New Zealand sees itself as neutral in U.S.-China competition”. Cooperation could well be considered on shared defence procurement issues, though again, Australia, the UK and Canada expect to fight wars in very different environments for very different goals, so even here a degree of scepticism must enter the conversation. 

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Given the vast disparity between the economic and foreign policy realities and the grand claims of the CANZUK enthusiasts, what are we to make of this sudden reflorescence of ideas first proposed, and then swiftly abandoned as unrealistic, at the height of Britain’s Edwardian golden age? The historians  Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce note in Shadows of Empire, their recent book on the Anglosphere, that “it is advocates of a free market, neo-liberal future for the UK who remain its most enthusiastic champions”, and that as the UK’s attachment to Europe soured, “the gravitational pull of the Anglosphere on the political imagination of neo-liberal Eurosceptics intensified”. 

“Politicians, commentators and think-tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, which had long-established transatlantic ties with Washington counterparts such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, began to publish pamphlets, speeches and blogs making the case for Brexit,” they note, which “reimagined Britain as a freewheeling, globally networked economy, striking trade deals with the USA, Canada and an expanded Asian and Australasian Anglosphere.”

Despite the overlap of personnel between these neoliberal ideologues and the Leave campaign, the campaign to exit the European Union consciously chose not to stand on a platform of Anglospheric neoliberalism. It correctly perceived that few in the Leave vote’s core areas share Kilcoyne’s perception of globalisation in which “the empirics of a world made richer, with more choice, happier, freer, more tolerant people, engaged in commerce with others right across the world would be obvious to all”. Who in the Red Wall clamours to keep the South China Sea safe for globalisation? Where is the popular demand to rework Britain’s constitutional order around neoliberal economics? This is, after all, precisely the worldview most Brexit voters were casting a defiant vote against. 

As Pearce and Kenny note, “a neo-Thatcherite idea of Brexit, which involves stripping away tariff barriers, reducing labour market and product regulations, and trading at ‘world prices’ remains a potentially toxic position to present to a public weary of austerity, facing years of declining living standards, and increasingly jaded in the face of the economic liberalism associated with the last few decades of government.” Aware of the absolute unpopularity of their ideology with British voters, neoliberals have tweaked their offering by dressing it up in dashing Edwardian garb.

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There is a danger that Johnson, with his fatal weakness for bombastic and absurd ideas, will hear the siren song of Westminster’s new Empire League; but this will be counterbalanced by his just as powerful ambition to remain in power, shoring up his fragile electoral coalition by giving his new working-class voters what they want, and not what neoliberal thinktankers demand they must suffer. This scheme is literally the work of an elite, and not a popular one. Everything about the EU that Red Wall voters hated, this would multiply.  

In any case, is there any meaningful support for CANZUK in its other mooted constituent nations? The CANZUK blogosphere asserts so, but — as is a recurring pattern here — this very much depends on which shifting definition is used. Certainly, a number of right-wing current and former politicians in Canada, New Zealand and Australia support a free trade agreement among the CANZUK nations, along with some form of free movement between them. Support for free movement, free trade and an undefined “security coordination” among the CANZUK nations is now a policy platform of Canada’s opposition Conservative party, but this is far from the federal superpower of Roberts’ imagining. 

CANZUK evangelists cite the Australian senator Eric Abetz as a supporter, but his explicit insistence that “this would absolutely not be a political union”, and that “I wouldn’t want a CANZUK Human Rights court which would determine what Australia or New Zealand parliaments can legislate”, again shows the limitations of the idea’s appeal even to its own supporters.

New Zealand’s leader, Jacinda Ardern, has expressed no interest in the idea whatsoever, though her coalition partner in the rightwing populist New Zealand First party supports free trade and movement, as does the leader of New Zealand’s opposition New Zealand National party, though again both are silent on the wider strategic aspirations of CANZUK’s true believers.

Similarly, Australia’s former leader Tony Abbott has expressed support for free trade and free movement among the CANZUK nations, and again, is silent on the wider geopolitical aspects. Support for the idea even in its most nebulous form is hardly unanimous among the ranks of Australia’s former prime ministers. Kevin Rudd, writing for The Guardian, has described CANZUK as “utter bollocks” and “the nuttiest of the many nutty arguments that have emerged from the Land of Hope and Glory set now masquerading as the authentic standard-bearers of British patriotism”. 

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The issue here is, as the political scientists Ben Wellings and Helen Baxendale note, that “in eschewing the type of institutional set-up that characterizes the EU, the success of the Anglosphere appears to rest on the existence of a constellation of like-minded politicians in English-speaking countries”. As long as the Antipodean and Canadian equivalents of Daniel Hannan or the other neoconservative and neoliberal occupants of the wilder fringes of British conservatism are in power, then the idea may seem viable, “but such alignments are ephemeral”.

A loose alliance dependent on the vagaries of four different electoral cycles for its very existence is clearly not a stable prospect. In any case, as Pearce and Kenny observe, generally speaking “the other core countries of the Anglosphere … remain indifferent to — or simply perplexed by — calls for some kind of formalised Anglosphere alliance.”  

Much of what is achievable is harmless, and may even bring a modest good; that which is actively dangerous is fortunately unlikely to be achievable. As a proposal to amplify Britain’s diplomatic reach, it is worth considering, though in any case it is Australia and Canada who have more to gain from sharing our UN seat than we do.

Easier movement between the CANZUK nations may well be popular, though the significantly differing immigration policies of Canada, New Zealand and Australia would present a barrier, whatever the strength of fellow feeling between the mother country and the dwindling proportion of the former colonies’ citizens who claim descent from these islands. How long the residual emotional pull of Britain’s political and cultural inheritance will survive the changing demographics of the former dominions is an open question. 

Eager to shy away from accusations of racial discrimination in choosing Britian’s former white colonies for political union over the rest of the Commonwealth, CANZUK’s adherents seem to advance the notion that the people of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are, whatever their origin, somehow metaphysically British, like those of Hong Kong, due to their adherence to Westminster-style governance and free trade dogma. But this is a shaky foundation on which to build a political union. Indeed, the very survival of the United Kingdom itself as a single political unit is looking shakier than it has at any time since its founding, and CANZUK’s evangelists would do better to worry about the continued existence of their own country before planning unions with other nations on the furthest corners of the globe. 

But it is as a Trojan horse to smuggle in failed and wildly unpopular economic belief-systems under the banner of imperial nostalgia that CANZUK’s neoliberal fantasies will have to be rejected. That these wild dreams are even entertained by MPs of the governing party only highlights the irreconcilable tensions within the Brexit vote, and the fragility of the Conservative Party’s hold on power.

They are useful only to show how far Whiggish fantasies have penetrated into British conservatism; and how bereft the ideologues are, perhaps fortunately for the national good, of meaningful or achievable ideas. Perhaps it is for the best that they are distracted by such a fanciful project, as long as it prevents them from doing more damage to this country than their harmful economic dogma has already achieved.

“Attempts over the past four years to articulate a coherent, post-Brexit foreign policy,” the thinktank RUSI cautions, “have largely been unsatisfactory,” and the Government’s grand-sounding but content-free Global Britain rhetoric does “not provide sufficient guidance for those charged with determining how to prioritise the use of scarce national resources.”

With our foreign policy establishment “at a loss about what to do next,” the SDSR is tasked with reshaping the Armed Forces to support a grand strategy in flux, and defend us from this newly dangerous world. It is unfortunate, then, that previous SDSRs, focussed on incorporating the hard-won lessons of the near past, have had a poor record of predicting the challenges of the near future. 

The 2010 SDSR assumed that the future of conflict would be interventions within failed states rather than against powerful adversaries, and cut the Army’s numbers drastically, only to see Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine prove that war between states remained a serious threat even on our own continent.

The 2015 SDSR arrested cuts to the Army’s capabilities to meet the new  Russian challenge, and placed greater focus on a terrorist threat made newly-salient by the rise of the Islamic State, yet it also explicitly aimed to “build a deeper partnership with China, working more closely together to address global challenges,” an assumption that now looks dangerously naive. The challenge for this year’s SDSR will be how to prepare our armed forces to defend Britain’s interests in an era of multipolar competition, where COVID has simultaneously heightened the risk of great power confrontation and ravaged the domestic tax base on which our defence budget depends.  

In this context, the details published in the Times of the proposed cuts to the armed forces the SDSR is expected to unveil are alarming. According to the leaks, the Army will lose a quarter of its personnel, shrinking from its current size of 74,000 down to 55,000 soldiers; the Royal Marines will lose their capacity to deploy as an amphibious brigade, losing their landing craft, artillery and engineering assets; and the RAF will lose its Hercules transport planes, diminishing its strategic airlift capacity, as well as its fleet of Puma helicopters.

Instead, the UK will commit a greater share of the defence budget to managing threats to cyber-security and in space, essentially leapfrogging the known and rapidly increasing risks of war between states to face the nebulous hybrid threats of the future. 

Of course, alarming leaks like this are a traditional feature of defence reviews, designed to either make the actual cuts seem less disastrous when revealed, or, as part of the internecine warfare within Whitehall, to make the political pressure on the MOD so great that planned cuts are quietly reversed. We can expect and hope, then, that the actual cuts will be less severe than the early leaks make them seem, and it’s reassuring that the defence secretary Ben Wallace has come out with a strong denial that the Army in particular will face such a brutal pruning.

The crucial question from which all these decisions spring is one of grand strategy: what are our armed forces actually for? How will they be deployed, against which threats, and to what ends? Looking at our newly unstable world, the most pressing threats are of a great power conflict with China in the Pacific, of a need to defend NATO’s eastern frontiers in the Baltic against actual or threatened Russian encroachment, and of a need to intervene in failing states in Europe’s “near abroad” of the Middle East and North Africa.

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At the heart of the problem, as recent analysis argues, is the question of whether “post-Brexit, the UK wishes to be a European or global actor… the more European security dominates, the greater the case for Army size and investment in recapitalising land equipment, while a more global Britain places greater emphasis on the rapid projection of UK forces, which tends to favour the maritime capabilities.”

But with the limited budget at our disposal meaning we are unable to adequately prepare for all these threats simultaneously, we are left to either gamble the nation’s security on which will be the most likely, or spread our bets evenly to meet all these challenges with insufficient resources, guaranteeing failure from the start. 

Of the three likely conflict scenarios facing us — a land confrontation with Russia in Eastern Europe, a naval one with China in the Pacific and stabilisation operations in the greater Middle East — the first two are beyond our current capacity to sustain, and the third has been a disaster almost every time we have attempted it. Even the significant armoured forces we deployed in Germany throughout the Cold War would have had a lifespan of days in the event of war, and we have long lost the ability to assemble such a force, let alone sustain it in the field.

The extravagantly expensive new aircraft carriers that have soaked up so much of our defence budgets were sold as enhancing Britain’s global reach and standing, but seeing them sent to the bottom of the South China Sea in the first hours of a major conflict would have the opposite effect. The prospect of stabilisation missions in failing states have long since lost whatever savour they once held for British politicians seeking glory on the world stage. Of the options available to us, then, none of them are enviable with our current capabilities.

A recent RUSI paper on the forthcoming SDSR is instructive on the debates within the foreign policy establishment on how we should plan for the future. Regarding intervention in failed states, it notes with brutal frankness that the SDSR should start “with an honest examination of the lessons that need to be learnt from the failure of recent interventions. The track record of recent discretionary state-building interventions has been so poor, and so consistent, that it no longer makes sense to use the possibility of future such operations (such as those in Basra and Helmand for the UK) as planning assumptions for force design.” 

Regarding the Pacific theatre, where China’s sudden assertiveness has rudely awoken British politicians from their Global Britain dreams, the RUSI paper notes that “the UK should operate on the assumption that it would only deploy forces on significant operations in these regions in a supporting role to the US, and then only with a small part of the UK’s available force.” Instead, it argues, “the UK’s expeditionary capabilities should be optimised for their contribution to NATO forces for the defence of Europe,” leaving the role of garrisoning NATO’s eastern borders to our European allies, particularly a Germany that has long shirked its defence responsibilities.

Instead of amassing our dwindling armoured forces on the plains of Eastern Europe , Britain should “optimise its ground forces (British Army and Royal Marines) for responding rapidly against a wide range of hybrid and limited threats across Europe’s periphery.” 

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The strategy proposed here is that our area of focus should be “the defence of the UK homeland and its immediate neighbourhood” on Europe’s outer borders, working alongside NATO allies, but only in pursuit of limited goals, providing strategic capabilities our European partners lack, but leaving them with the responsibility of supplying the critical mass of troops we can no longer field.

Yet cutting the Royal Marines’ capacity to deploy by sea or the Army’s ability to deploy by RAF Hercules would seem to be the exact opposite of planning for limited interventions even in our near abroad. Focussed on the expensive big-ticket purchases that allow us to project air power on a global stage in support of our American patron, we may be distractedly cutting our ability to defend ourselves from the threats closer to home with which the US, distracted by China and by its own domestic instability, may have limited interest in engaging. 

Indeed, given our total strategic dependence on the United States, it’s worth following American discussions on how they see the role of their allies in future wars. To this end, a fascinating recent paper from West Point’s Modern War Institute ought to give our planners pause for thought. It argues that, given China’s inbuilt advantage in a Pacific war, and the extreme vulnerability of US carrier fleets, let alone those of weaker allies like ourselves, to withstand Chinese missile barrages,“the United States has little use of mid-sized nations that pay a premium for expeditionary, high-tech capabilities” — a succinct description of the UK’s current defence posture — but should “encourage its allies to build forces that can withstand war in their area instead.”

This plan to rebalance America’s assets to cope with the stresses of a multipolar world explicitly cites the British Empire’s policy of complementing naval hegemony through alliances with European powers willing to take up the unwanted burden of land warfare, and tallies well with the developing consensus in British think tanks that we should do much the same on a far smaller scale. 

Yet even this is only a stopgap solution. As for the pivot to a low-cost, high-tech future, the hope that investing in technology can fill the gap between our growing needs and our dwindling resources must be seen for the wishful thinking it is.

The rebalancing of our armed forces to focus on the hybrid threats of cyber-warfare, allegedly Dominic Cummings’ pet project, threatens to make an undoubtedly necessary additional capability our main effort, and RUSI is right to warn that “pretending that future war will be bloodless, limited to creating virtual or cyber casualties, makes the carnage of real war more likely,” and that ultimately, “the use of hard power to inflict pain on an adversary in pursuit of national political objectives remains at the heart of a state’s power.”

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By Tom Swarbrick

While Cummings’ drive to reform the MoD’s grotesquely mismanaged procurement strategy is urgently necessary, there is, unfortunately for the government, no other way out of addressing the strategic threats facing us over the coming decades than taxing voters more and spending more money on defence, whatever the political costs in doing so. Doing more with less was shortsighted even when the times were good, and with the international situation deteriorating so rapidly, underinvestment is a luxury we can no longer afford.

The risk of major conventional warfare between states is greater than it has been in any of our lifetimes, and Britain needs to maintain the ability to deploy hard power quickly enough and with sufficient threat of force behind it to deter our adversaries from escalating threats to a level we are unable to match.

Given that “the UK’s relationship with the US is now less reliable than at any time over the last half-century,” it is in our interest to maintain our ability to defend ourselves from as many of the rapidly accumulating risks on our own doorstep as possible, while rebuilding alliances with our estranged European partners and enhancing military ties with likeminded powers further afield.

In the meantime, our defence aspirations should be focused on the regional threats we still — just — retain the capacity to manage, leaving the more ambitious global challenges to our American patron. For too long, there has been a striking mismatch between the government’s “global Britain” aspirations and the more homely reality of our capabilities, and we are perhaps fortunate that by accelerating global trends that may otherwise have taken decades to play out, COVID has helped reveal our meagre hand before we have committed ourselves to playing it.