A truly "global britain" must listen more, and lecture less | thearticle

In the first part of his excellent BBC Radio 4 series, “As Others See Us”, the former British Museum director Neil MacGregor examined how Germans see this country on the eve of Brexit. The

most interesting and in many ways impressive of the people he interviewed was the writer and television presenter Thea Dorn. Now in her forties, Ms Dorn explains that her German upbringing

and education was entirely Eurocentric, with Britain playing a marginal role at best. At university in Berlin, she learned English by reading philosophical texts. There she fell in love,

improbably enough, with John Stuart Mill: “For me, Britain is the cradle and maybe the lighthouse of the idea of liberty. That is for me then most beautiful idea ever conceived by mankind.”

Her own view of Britain, and that of her contemporaries, is strongly influenced by Margaret Thatcher, she says. She was astounded by the Falklands War: the idea of a civilised nation going

to war was unthinkable to her generation of Germans. Thatcherism was equally alien, echoing the old German prejudice against the British as “greedy capitalists”. And Mrs Thatcher’s

opposition to German reunification was contrasted with a more accommodating French attitude. MacGregor’s most eminent guest is Germany’s leading elder statesman, Wolfgang Schäuble. Now

President of the Bundestag (Speaker of the German Federal Parliament), Dr Schäuble gives full credit to the British for creating, developing and exporting parliamentary democracy to the

entire world. Growing up after World War II, he says, he learned from Winston Churchill’s _History of the Second World War_ what a “global view” of politics really meant: “Our perspective

had only been a continental European view. What Singapore meant in terms of World War II was entirely unknown to me.” It is striking that Dr Schäuble mentions Singapore in this context,

because many EU politicians are allergic to the notion that after Brexit the UK might follow the Singapore model of free trade and low taxes. With hindsight, the fall of Singapore to the

Japanese in 1942 signalled the end of the British Empire, but Singapore is only one of many former colonies and dominions to have flourished since 1945, thanks at least in part to the

inheritance of British ideas and traditions, such as the rule of law. This week the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has been in Singapore, where he gave a speech in which he tried to explain

to his domestic audience why the Singaporeans’ economic and educational achievements had much to teach their former colonial masters. In response, his Labour shadow Emily Thornberry

delivered a withering put-down. Hunt, she claimed, had dared to “besmirch our values by singing the praises of a country like Singapore”, where “basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, free

speech and even sexuality are not respected but criminalised”. Ms Thornberry naturally ignores some inconvenient facts: that while Singapore (like most Asian countries) has a rather

different attitude from Britain to democracy and liberty, it also has the third highest standard of living in the world, among the lowest taxes and unemployment, has a per capita level of

wealth twice that of the UK, and its 15-year-olds are global leaders in literacy, numeracy and science. So no wonder the Foreign Secretary has gone out of his way to praise the Singapore

model. He is right to visit the great symbol of free trade, which the British founded, lost and liberated, to see what lessons we can learn for the post-Brexit era. Ms Thornberry is, to say

the least, undiplomatic to dismiss the incredible achievements of this city state. Heaven help Britain if she is to be the global face of a Corbyn government. As Thea Dorn and Wolfgang

Schäuble rightly acknowledge, the British have much to be proud of in their nurturing of liberty and parliamentary democracy; and much of the world still hesitates to embrace them. But the

global perspective that it is our good fortune to inherit should also oblige us to pay attention to the many ways in which our former apprentices have outstripped us. We cannot afford to

rest on our laurels, or we shall be no more than a museum of past glories. A global Britain implies that our leaders must lecture others less and listen a little more.