Global Britain - Will The Spin Work?

Theresa May has an incomparable advantage over just about every other UK politician with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbyn.   Nobody knows what she really thinks about the EU and she is free to define how she handles it without too much in the way of prior baggage.  (I know Corbyn's case is quite different, but that's not what this post is about.)


So she has until recently quite a lot more room to shape her position than anyone else would have had.  And she has used that good fortune - I don't think it can have been planned - to good effect so far.  But she had to come to a position at some point and has now done so.  At first sight I was quite impressed.  She has made a virtue of necessity by claiming to be in favour of some workers' rights.  There will almost certainly be a need for some kinds of protections for people in jobs during the transition period so why not make it a selling point.   But above all she has gone big on the new opportunities for trade outside the EU.  

This is smart politics and should play well.  Even socialists like myself are pretty patriotic so like to hear the word Britain being associated with a positive sounding adjective.  And global is a great way of framing what is going on.  We aren't leaving Europe, we are just joining the world.

So at first I was quite impressed.  And insofar as anyone can tell, which isn't much, it seems to have gone down well enough with the public.  I thought it was a good positioning for the external consumption as well.  Britain is open for business and happy to trade with anyone is a good story.

The thing that rather punctured this for me was picking up a New York Times op-ed piece on the subject.  The tone is not so much derisive as condescending.  From outside, it doesn't look like Britain is embracing globalism.  How could leaving the world's biggest free trade zone look that way?  And is the EU itself insular?  Hardly, in fact it has deals in place around the planet.

All in all, far from being a sign that Britain is looking outwards Brexit makes us look like people who don't even really know how the world works.

Does it matter?  Well this is just one opinion piece in one newspaper.  It doesn't necessarily represent anyone's view apart from the author's.  But the ease with which the British spin is demolished is a bit worrying.  The trouble is that perceptions are rather important to decision making.  And if enough people around the globe think we are insular and backward looking, well that is a problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/20/opinion/theresa-mays-global-britain-is-baloney.html?_r=0