British self-righteousness and hatred of foreigners are destroying us

British self-righteousness and hatred of foreigners are destroying us

The United Kingdom's attitude towards the war with Iran has been a national disgrace and has shown that Britain has a powerless military and non-existent diplomacy. This is symptomatic of the growing ignorance of our British elite, with ministers coming and going so often that they can do nothing useful, while our universities go bankrupt and we struggle to train new talent capable of understanding a complex world.

 

And there is an underlying elite, colonialist mentality whereby the people running Britain have a fundamental aversion to foreigners, while at the same time talking about diversity, equality and inclusion. Against this backdrop, we are told, and despite the fact that Britain wastes billions every year on a useless military machine, that the Ministry of Defence is preparing a new plan to gear us up for war.

The United Kingdom urgently needs a new approach; that approach requires abandoning any pretence of being a global foreign power and instead focusing on the national problems that matter to ordinary people.

The United Kingdom: A Self‑Deceiving Farce on the World Stage

If ever there was a week that stripped the United Kingdom of its last pretensions to global relevance, it was this week. According to Ian Proud’s devastating analysis, Britain has been revealed as a country without functioning diplomacy, an army that cannot even defend its own shores, and a political class so lost in propaganda that it confuses bombast with influence.

Let us start with Iran. 

The British attitude towards the Middle East crisis is a textbook case of delusional posturing. Ministers talk big about not wanting “America’s war”, but that is not a principle – it is impotence disguised as wisdom. The UK has zero influence on Donald Trump or anyone else. Instead of taking a principled stand that the US and Israel should scale back, British officials do something far worse: they blame Iran for being attacked. In diplomatic terms, that is the equivalent of a police officer telling a rape victim that she asked for it.

Then there is the military farce.

HMS Dragon, a destroyer so plagued by mishaps that it ends up in hospital – either because the toilets didn't work, or because a Hezbollah rocket hit it (neither option inspires confidence). Britain talks about bringing stability to the region while it cannot even deploy one warship. The Royal Navy, once the pride of the world, now chases Russian shadow tankers through the Channel with a 12‑metre fishing boat crewed by a Telegraph journalist. If this were a Monty Python sketch, you would laugh. But it is real.

And what of diplomacy?

Yvette Cooper holds useless Zoom meetings in which she demands that Iran open the Strait of Hormuz – from a position of absolutely no power to achieve that. She is just the latest in a revolving door of clueless foreign ministers. In the past twelve years, they have barely had time to warm their seats, let alone develop their own ideas. So foreign policy is determined by the “Whitehall expert class” – a term that has become an oxymoron. These experts have not understood Iran since the fall of the Shah. They have not wanted to understand Iran, because understanding would lead to talking, and talking would lead to diplomacy. And diplomacy, for the British elite, is a sign of weakness.

Instead, the mantra is: more pressure, more sanctions, more demands. Iran never gives in. It simply closes a shipping route and tightens its grip on the world economy. Yet Whitehall’s echo chamber is so thick that ministers still believe Iran will one day do as it is told. The mainstream media play along with this fiction, reassuring the public that success is just around the corner.

The result?

Britain talks loudly on the world stage and is ignored by everyone. Proud’s analogy is harsh but accurate: Britain is the fat, stupid kid in the schoolyard trying to bully its way into looking like the boss, while the smarter, better‑looking children just walk away.
Why is Britain so stupid? Because it has stopped training diplomats in diplomacy. It has stopped teaching young people foreign languages, foreign cultures, foreign histories. Understanding other countries would mean talking to foreigners – and the British elite, for all its talk of diversity and inclusion, actually despises foreigners. Foreigners are people we used to dominate and boss around during the empire. They have a different skin colour, speak unintelligible languages, follow strange religions. We occupied their lands, but we do not want them to come to our “green and pleasant land”.

Brexit made this official. 

The government has effectively hung a sign over British universities saying: “Fuck off, foreigners.” That has destroyed a revenue stream of £42 billion a year, plunged top universities into financial crisis, and ensured that a new generation of Britons can no longer afford foreign languages or foreign ways of thinking. The vicious circle is complete: Whitehall’s expert class is replenished each year by clueless graduates who know that making a career means aligning themselves with an ever‑shrinking Overton window.

Britain has become a joke. The cruel truth is that we do not realise how stupid we look. We think we are brilliant. In the Olympics of foreign policy, our ministers think they are Usain Bolt, while making Eddie the Eagle look like a gold medallist.

But the most shameful thing about this week was not just the irrelevance. It was the propaganda. Prime Minister Keir Starmer struts through the Middle East like a conquering emperor, with highly produced videos meant to suggest he is a world giant. He is not. If he had visited hospitals, schools and roads in Rochdale or Glasgow, people would have less of a problem with it. Instead, the entire government machine is geared to creating a belief that Britain is a mover and shaker. It is not.

Decisions by both Conservative and Labour governments have plunged Britain into obscurity. We are wrapped in a Stratcom comfort blanket, knitted from hubris and self‑deception. We churn out meaningless publicity videos at an ever‑increasing pace to convince an increasingly sceptical public that we matter – while each year we add less. This obsession with spin, dating back to Alastair Campbell’s time at Number 10, has now killed us figuratively. Soon it may kill us literally.

Take the Ministry of Defence’s latest move.

After not publishing a defence investment plan since 2022 (four years of silence), and refusing to publish the plan before the local elections because it contains mostly bad news, the MOD has seamlessly switched to an information campaign. The message? Britain must get ready for war.

The Chief of the Defence Staff – who, according to Proud, looks and sounds like an Asda assistant manager – speaks solemnly about “resilience for a possible war”. Sky News interviews a pseudo‑academic from an MOD‑funded Oxford think tank, who warns that Russia has 95 to 97 per cent of its capabilities ready to attack a European NATO member state. Never mind that Russia has occupied only 2 per cent of Ukrainian territory in the past two years. Never mind the total lack of evidence that Russia plans to attack a NATO country. Never mind that the war in Ukraine has always been about NATO’s eastward expansion and Russia’s desire for sovereign equality, not world conquest.

This is a shaping operation. 

The goal is to soften up the public for a big increase in defence spending – which will mean more taxes and fewer public services. Proud is not necessarily against more spending on defence, if the money were spent well. But it will not be. The British army is the smallest since the beginning of full registration. The navy is as small as at the end of the English Civil War in the 17th century. We cannot even produce a defence investment plan because the MOD has lost control of its own procurement. Zombie projects like Ajax armoured vehicles and Orca submarines are so far behind schedule that they may have to be scrapped. Other projects cost far more than originally budgeted. And we have too many contractors clinging to the hugely inflated breast of defence procurement, but not enough money to pay for it all – especially not if the government also wants to reform the NHS, build a railway line that goes beyond Birmingham, or add a runway at Heathrow.

The obvious truth is that the defence investment plan has already been written. It will show that most of our projects are failing. So instead of publishing it before the local elections in May (where Labour is already heading for a “sizable drubbing”), the government invents a big idea: preparing for war with an enemy that does not want to attack us, with equipment we do not own, with money we do not have, while inflicting misery on our own citizens.

The cynical calculation is that ordinary Britons, faced with a dwindling number of meaningful jobs and an economy artificially kept alive by an eternal proxy war in Ukraine, will be almost grateful to put on a military uniform. At least they earn a wage – even if that wage comes with the risk of dying, or for women the risk of being groped by superiors. This is morally reprehensible. It is also dangerous.

Because there is an alternative.

Instead of trying to save the world, war after war, Britain could focus its national energy on restoring its greatness at home. Rebuild our industries. Restore our transport infrastructure. Renovate our hospitals, schools and universities. Be proud of our workers. Welcome foreigners who spend money here. Abandon the ambitions of military greatness. Throw out the zombie defence projects. Build a navy and army large enough to protect our coasts – nothing more. Reinvest in diplomacy. Step back from trying to play the role of a foreign‑policy titan, which we are not and have not been for a very long time.

We need to rebuild a culture of diplomacy in which we try to understand other countries not as a neo‑imperial power, but as equal partners. Strive for peaceful coexistence, not confrontation. Britain is an island – a small island, even if it is a large one. Yet our leaders have reduced us to a wretched state.
The challenge of restoring our status as a nation state is enormous. The work must begin today – not through scaremongering, but through hard work and a relentless focus on the needs of ordinary working people. They have been ignored and patronised by the mainstream for too long.

Keir Starmer is not the person to lead that fight. In fact, there seems to be no serious political leader in Britain today capable of doing so. That may be the most crushing indictment of all.