‘Global Britain’: a phrase that provokes mockery and even indignation. As an alternative to EU membership many consider it impossible and worse, undesirable. Are we capable of true independence, or is this an illusion? Does ‘global Britain’, as its bitterest critics accuse, draw on imperial nostalgia and nationalistic arrogance? Or is it a rational response to a changing world?
It is certainly not a new response. Britain has been a global player since the 1730s. Since the early 1800s we have had to be: with a population of 14 million we were no longer able to feed ourselves, and Britain’s enemies looked forward to the day when it would starve. Sir Robert Peel abolished the protectionist Corn Laws to import the cheapest food available: ‘We might on moral and social grounds prefer cornfields to cotton factories, but our lot is cast.’
Ever since, our goods trade has been precariously in balance and increasingly in deficit — now overwhelmingly with the artificially expensive EU and its Corn Law equivalent.
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