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

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Far from being a minor player, Snell argues, the UK has often been decisive in world affairs, for instance by supplying the dodgy intelligence that justified America's invasion of Iraq and providing money-laundering services for the Russian elite in London.

At first sight Snell’s position seems slavishly contrary, as though he thinks that maybe Britain should have lost more lives in Syria fighting in a truly hellish sectarian nightmare with no winners. In this engrossing and frankly deeply troubling book , former senior British diplomat Snell explains how Britain’s often incompetent, inconsistent and sometimes downright greedy foreign policy has played a pivotal role in rendering the world a more dangerous place. The chapter on Boris Johnson is a dossier of corruption and amorality, which should be read by anyone who still believes that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel was fit for office. The Labour government faced severe economic challenges—including post-World War II record levels of unemployment and inflation—yet Wilson was able to renegotiate British membership in the EEC, which was confirmed in a referendum in June 1975.The Cold War added further complexities, as Britain attempted to insulate former colonies from the influence of the Soviet Union. Some industries, such as aircraft manufacture, were far larger than was now needed, while others, such as railways and coal mines, were desperately short of new equipment and in bad repair. I don’t mean that whatever one says will have no effect on their success, though in the case of James O’Brien’s How They Broke Britain, which comprises an extended “charge sheet” of the nine men and one woman its author believes set the UK on a course of unnecessary decline, this is indubitably the case. The saddest thing about this story of national decline is that none of the right people will ever read it. For example, there was huge media coverage and political outcry in the UK around the poisonings in Salisbury by Russian agents.

Britain, in effect, had no choice but to withdraw from colonial territories it no longer had the military and economic power to control. Post-Brexit, the UK has agreed an international treaty with the EU and within a year announced its intention to break it. It was the ideology developed in the Balkans that later justified the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.The reality is that Britain is a large economy, with a powerful military, and is disproportionally influential. Nigel Farage, the show’s latest political signing, may well end up having to eat more than his share of kangaroo anuses.

It was also acknowledged that, “with the benefit of hindsight” it proved to be wishful thinking that Libya’s rebels would exclude radical Islamists.

In How Britain broke the world, Arthur Snell assaults readers with a barrage of chapters about foreign policy, military and intelligence mishaps. These may seem like small distinctions, but together they are all the difference between a conspiracy nut and a serious polemicist. Ultimately, to realign our foreign policy with our values faces a profoundly important challenge: agreement as a nation as to what our values are.

In the eighteenth century, especially after the territorial gains of the Seven Years’ War, there was a widespread bitterness that the country had branched off from its constitutional roots; and against this background the historian Gibbon wrote his six-volume Decline and Fall. The Indian independence movement had come of age during World War I and had gained momentum with the Massacre of Amritsar of 1919.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners.