With our international reputation in tatters, we need to take a long, hard look at ourselves and our place in the world
“ ‘Very well, alone’ did good service for Winston Churchill as a wartime rallying cry in 1940,” says Andrew Rawnsley (“Boris Johnson’s Global Britain is exposed as impotent and friendless by Afghanistan”, Comment). The myth that Britain “stood alone” in the Second World War and that Europe was then liberated from “our island fortress” was woven by Margaret Thatcher in her 1988 Bruges speech and became one of the driving fictions of Brexit.
“Where is Global Britain in the streets of Kabul?” was a little rich coming from Theresa May, who declared, when triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty in 2017: “I want Britain to be… a great, global trading nation that is respected around the world and strong, united and confident at home.”