London, one of John Le Carre’s characters reflects in The Night Manager, is ‘the land of make-believe power’. These lines were written in 1993, a year when the British economy was in dollar terms larger than that of India and the People’s Republic of China combined. What Le Carre would have made of Britain today, long since overtaken economically by China, and grappling with a host of problems at home and abroad, does not bear thinking about.
Pessimism about the United Kingdom’s position in the world has a long pedigree
Pessimism about the United Kingdom’s position in the world has a very long pedigree. In 1897, at what appeared the high point of the British Empire, the ‘bard of empire’, Rudyard Kipling, penned ‘Recessional’ to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. He warned that ‘far-called our navies melt away’, and that soon the ‘pomp’ of the empire would be no more than the defunct civilisations of ‘Nineveh and Tyre’. A few years later, the secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, lamented that ‘the weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of his fate’. These voices swelled after the Second World War and the onset of decolonisation, and reached a crescendo immediately following the Brexit referendum in 2016.
