How Britain Broke the World: War, Greed and Blunders from Kosovo to Afghanistan, 1997-2022

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Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. Hutton is a former economics editor of The Guardian, former editor-in-chief of The Observer and former principal of Hertford College, Oxford. His first book, upon which tonight’s talk is based, is How Britain Broke the World (Canberry Press, 2022). I have come to realise that stuff we live through we tend to brush off; it can't be history yet because it's happening today.

It's funny that Alastair Campbell has reignited his career recently with that podcast with Rory Stewart, making fun of Boris.

Before the war, Britain maintained colonies all over the world, which provided valuable raw materials, manpower and strategic bases.View image in fullscreen James O’Brien: ‘relies almost entirely for his text on the hard labour – the investigations, and the thinking – of others’. Macmillan remained in office until October 1963, when he too retired because of ill health, to be succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, then foreign secretary. In his new book How Britain Broke the World, former diplomat Arthur Snell argues that recent foreign policy disasters have had an impact far beyond those countries.

In a separate discussion, Snell references the ‘spectre of a frozen conflict’ in Ukraine, a subject that he has interrogated at length in a popular podcast, Doomsday Watch. The 2013 Syria vote in Parliament certainly influenced US President Barack Obama to sit on his hands. Labour’s parliamentary position was precarious, and the party lost its governing majority through a series of by-election defeats and defections.He expected the accounts to have been well thumbed in recent years, by analysts on behalf of government, but the archivist confirmed that the sources had not been disturbed for decades. Many of the challenges we have are from people who are trying to give simple solutions to complex problems 4. The pound was sharply devalued in 1949, and a general election on February 23, 1950, reduced Labour’s majority over the Conservative and Liberal parties to only five seats. The book is already a bestseller; a recent event promoting it required a venue change, so great was the demand for tickets.

What we get is fact-based analysis, startling for the simple reason that so many of those facts land so disruptively, and startling for the consistency of the main trajectory, which is how poorly the UK has been served by its leaders in recent decades. With decades of service in the Foreign Office, Snell, an Arabic speaker who has worked with UK intelligence, looks at British interventions from Kosovo to Iraq to Afghanistan, along with the UK policy towards Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. And, even aside from the ten people who get their own chapters, the smaller fry is not spared either, whether political bullies like Dominic Raab or hatemongers like Douglas Murray.

What we have instead is the toxic aftermath of BREXIT, says Snell, where ‘global Britain’ is a cypher for refusing to talk about our immediate neighbours, but where the current Prime Minister (at the time of writing) repeatedly travels to Ukraine to live up to his own version of playing a wartime leader, ignoring the fact that he refused to give Ukraine any weapons as Foreign Minister, alongside then Prime Minister Theresa May, despite Russia’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014. The launching of these airstrikes was the first sustained use of armed force by Nato in its 50-year history. This decision was announced on June 3, 1947, and British administration in India ended 10 weeks later, on August 15.