The headline is stark, almost jarringly so: the UK economy contracts, a tremor from the Persian Gulf rattling the shelves of Tesco and the ledgers of Threadneedle Street. The Treasury, that great mausoleum of fiscal optimism, vows “resilience” as if repeating the word enough times will conjure it into being. But let us be clear: this is not an accident of geopolitics. It is the predictable harvest of a foreign policy that has, for decades, mistaken enthusiasm for strategy.
Iran. The name itself carries the weight of empires past: Persia, the Silk Road, the oil-fuelled ambitions of the twentieth century. And now, once again, we see British supply chains snagged on the thorns of a Middle Eastern war. Oil prices spike, shipping lanes grow treacherous, and the cost of everything from petrol to polyethylene creeps upward. The Treasury’s promise of “resilience” is a fine piece of rhetoric, but rhetoric does not pay the gas bill. It does not fill the shelves of a supermarket in Croydon.
One is reminded of the 1973 oil crisis, when the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent embargo sent the West into a tailspin of stagflation. The parallels are uncomfortable, and they are not lost on those of us who recall that the British economy then was far more muscular, far less dependent on the fugitive whims of global finance. Today’s economy is a different creature: a service-sector leviathan that feeds on cheap energy and smooth trade routes. Disrupt those, and you starve the beast.
But let us not pretend this is solely about Iran or the latest escalation. This is about the hollowing out of our industrial base, the delusion that a nation can thrive on banking and consultancy alone. We have spent a generation dismantling the very things that made us resilient: manufacturing, energy independence, a robust merchant marine. And now, when the winds of war blow, we find ourselves exposed, shivering in the cold.
The Treasury’s vow is a classic piece of British stoicism, the stiff upper lip in Whitehall. But stoicism is not a plan. It is a posture. And postures, however dignified, do not insulate a nation from the consequences of its own neglect. We are seeing the bill for the Iraq Adventure, for the Libyan Folly, for every time we hitched our wagon to American grand strategy without asking if the wheels were secure.
What, then, is to be done? The usual nostrums will be trotted out: interest rate adjustments, targeted fiscal stimulus, perhaps a bit of quantitative easing. But these are palliatives, not cures. They treat the symptom – a contracting GDP – while ignoring the disease: a strategic vulnerability that we have chosen, wilfully and repeatedly, to ignore. The Victorians understood that trade followed the flag, but they also understood that the flag had to be able to protect the trade. We have forgotten that lesson, or perhaps we have simply outsourced it to the Americans and hoped for the best.
In the long arc of history, empires that forget how to supply themselves do not survive. They become clients, then supplicants, then footnotes. The UK is not there yet, but the trajectory is clear. Every crisis is a test, and we are failing these tests with depressing regularity. The question is not whether the Treasury can talk its way through the next quarter. The question is whether we have the will to rebuild what we have allowed to decay.
So let the Treasury vow resilience. Let the politicians assure us that all is well. But those of us who read history, who see the patterns, know that resilience is not a promise. It is a practice. And practice, my friends, we have not.
