![]() Instead of investing sufficient resources in renewable energy at home to reach Net Zero… …while the British army faces further cuts. …undermining our ability to tackle climate change, conflict and future pandemics.īillions of pounds of the defence budget have been lost in mismanagement and waste… …abandoning a cross party consensus and a manifesto commitment… ![]() It made short-sighted cuts to aid when global humanitarian need has never been greater… Just months after Boris Johnson claimed ‘the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European land mass are over’…Īnd the government’s mistakes in foreign policy go beyond Europe. The Integrated Review of foreign and defence policy was trumpeted by Boris Johnson as a British ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific’ and scarcely mentions Europe beyond NATO. The Conservatives have turned us into a country of high tax and low growth. The Office for Budget Responsibility still predicts the government’s badly negotiated deal will reduce the UK’s gross domestic product by 4 per cent. …the OECD predicts that next year the UK will have the lowest growth in the G20. There is consensus among economists that the government’s poorly negotiated deal with the EU has contributed to the UK lagging behind the rest of the G7 in trade recovery.Įxcept for Putin’s Russia which is facing unprecedented sanctions… …but the Conservatives cannot hide from the fact that their choices have left us more damaged than almost any other comparable economy. The series of crises we have lived through has made the world less stable… We face this from a new settled position outside of the EU, but without a clear direction set for our foreign policy. The last six years have upended many assumptions, exposing us to new threats and shaking the foundations of the international order. …and forced so many of us to miss out on the close relationships we depend on.Īnd now Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has marked the return of large-scale land war to our continent. …until a novel variant took millions of lives… Very few of us had heard of coronaviruses… The Taliban were on the fringes of Afghanistan, not in power in Kabul. …Not a surreal nightmare we lived through, and which continues to put American democracy under threat. …let’s not forget that was the week in June 2016 when England lost to Iceland in the Euros.īut to say the years since have been very challenging globally is an understatement.īack in the summer of 2016, the Trump presidency was a danger on the horizon… The world has changed considerably since the day of that vote. We are now six years on from the referendum. ![]() It’s great to be with you at what is a vital moment for Britain’s relationship with the EU and a critical time for European security. You and your colleagues at The UK in a Changing Europe have been an invaluable resource as we have navigated these last few years. Thank you, Anand, for inviting me here today.
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