David Cameron and Foreign Policy

In his Mansion House Speech on Monday evening David Cameron, as is the tradition of this annual Prime Ministerial visit to the City of London, set out his, and therefore the government’s, view of the nature of British foreign policy in future. For the first time since the end of the cold war, we heard of a new, pragmatic approach which would put British interests, meaning British economic interests, before everything else.

Being economically strong and commercially active is a far better way to gain influence than, in the modern world, power projection, confrontation and endless lectures about human rights and democracy. At the end of the day the latter two hold little attraction if the price you pay is being blown up when you go to market, starvation through famine, living without electric power and all the other suffering now apparent in countries upon whom the West has sanctimoniously imposed its own government model.

If we start to pay attention to how we can sell to China, Russia, India, Brazil and Turkey, countries sniffed at and largely ignored by officials in the past (if not by enterprising business people) we shall be on the way to reinventing ourselves as a Tiger, or rather a Bulldog economy, which will help to get us out of the horrendous financial mess the latter period of Thatcherism and the entire stewardship of New Labour dumped us into.

Much has to be done at home to make our economy competitive. This is not easy when the government has to borrow one in every four pounds pound it spends and when our total national and private indebtedness is the second largest in the world. The largest, that of the U.S is one and a half times bigger, but its population is bigger by five times. 

That is why we need to get to work to pursue our own interests. The Prime Minister is showing, perhaps to many this is surprising, a refreshingly clear of understanding of what has to be done. He also talked of lack of preparedness for the wars on which we had embarked and a lack of strategic understanding of where they were headed. Good stuff.