Sunset on the British Empire?

The sun is setting — literally, this time — on the British Empire. That’s the upshot of Prime Minister Starmer’s handover of the Chagos Islands to Britain’s former Indian Ocean colony, Mauritius. While the apogee of the globe-spanning empire passed decades ago, this is, the Financial Times reports, “the first time in more than three centuries” that night will fall on British territory. There’s now a gap between the Pitcairn Islands and military bases on Cyprus. “Men are we,” Wordsworth wrote when Venice finally fell, “and must grieve when even the Shade / Of that which once was great is passed away.” That’s not to say the loss of a few tropical islands is much cause for lamentation, even if it is a reminder of Britain’s eclipse as a world power. It is, rather, an occasion to mark anew the opportunity Brexit has presented an independent Britain, free from the fetters of the continental superstate, to forge a new global role. What, then, is Sir Keir doing by traipsing over to Brussels to visit with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and crooning about “the importance of the unique relationship” between Britain and the EU and vowing to “ambitiously” boost cooperation? Sir Keir also pledged to bind Britain under the EU’s European Convention on Human Rights. That would leave Britain under Brussels’ thumb in legal matters despite Brexit’s promise.In particular, on one of the critical issues facing Britain, the migrant crisis, staying under the convention would hamstring the U.K.’s efforts to deport those pressing phony claims of asylum, the AP reports. That rankles Brexiteers who had hoped to make a clean break of any legal constraints imposed by Brussels. Under the Labor government, that looks like a distant prospect, especially with Sir Keir vowing to pay another visit to Brussels this autumn.These columns have warned about the likely moves by Labor to cozy back up to the EU — “the slippery slope that would lead to the reversal of British independence.” What a failure of imagination. Feature, by contrast, the vision put forward by Prime Minister Truss, who called for seizing the chance offered by Brexit to forge “a much bolder economic model” for Britain. She depicts it as “more like Singapore on steroids than a Norway on valium.”The adage about the sun never setting on the empire took root in the 19th century as the British empire gained new territories across the globe. It’s not our intention here to opine on the concept of empire, though as citizens of a union of former colonies, Americans of an earlier era were known to use the jibe about how “the sun never set on the British Empire, because even God couldn’t trust the English in the dark.”In any event, “the collapse of British power,” chronicled by historian Correlli Barnett in his book of that name, can be seen as a cautionary tale by America, a weary, debt-burdened Atlas trying to maintain its role as global superpower. Barnett notes how Britain at World War I’s end bestrode the world as a colossus. It had the world’s largest population and had just fielded an army of 8.6 million men. Sterling was the world’s reserve currency. In 1921 the prime minister of South Africa, General Smuts, reckoned, despite his own faults, that “only unwisdom or unsound policy” could rob Britain of its “great position.” Yet within 20 years Britain was prostrate, scrambling to evacuate its army from Dunkirk, and nearly defenseless against a resurgent Germany. That is how quickly the mantle of global leadership can fall in the absence of sound economic and other policies at home and abroad.Those lessons beckon today for Britain, and America, too. In the end, the empire — “the red on the map” — was a symbol, not the basis, of British influence. The home islands themselves, it could be argued, were, all along, the wellspring of Britain’s rise to industrial predominance, wealth, and global power. So as the sun sets for the first time on the old empire, we’d like to think there are grounds to hope that Britain will again discover a road to glory.

Sunset on the British Empire?

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