Nowhere To Turn

International events have shown Britain isolated and without a clear foreign policy

Sep 25, 2026

Towering Columns

In The Times, Juliet Samuel says that our foreign policy has become completely incoherent.

In John Healey, he appears to have picked a biddable chancellor. Healey, whose supposedly principled resignation over defence spending helped precipitate the coup that brought Burnham to power, now says we will have to wait for the spending review, at some unspecified date, to be told how Britain will meet its defence needs. This is a rather surprising turn after his resignation letter, in which he declared himself “certain” that the government should commit immediately to spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030, and said he would “not be able to accept” an investment plan that “falls well short” or is “backloaded”, because time is short. Military chiefs had warned earlier that defence needs an extra £28 billion, but even after Sir Keir Starmer gave it a little extra the defence investment plan on the books comes to £15 billion.
Aside from spending, British foreign and security policy continues to be a mess. We want to keep hold of the Falklands but we are desperate to give away Chagos. We want to sanction Israel but also need its intelligence and defence technology. We’ve talked a good game about fielding troops for a “coalition of the willing” in Ukraine while cancelling exercises and laying off reservists. We declare rock-solid support for allies on the eastern front with Russia while ignoring their pleas to allow the use of essential defensive weaponry such as landmines. We have “recognised” Palestine while declining to recognise where its borders are or who its government is.
We depend utterly on the goodwill of the “special relationship” while cutting US air force access to our bases. We are wasting precious Foreign Office time on a huge lobbying campaign to install a British judge on the International Court of Justice who supports the Chagos giveaway, even as the court threatens Britain with trillions in “climate reparations”. We lecture the world on carbon emissions while relying on gas shipped across the Atlantic instead of using our own. We talk of resilience while assuming benevolence.

On Substack, Martha Dacombe argues that rejoining the EU is not a strategy for preserving our AI strength in a world of great power competition.

Rather, a serious strategy for the UK, if it is going to accept the label of being a middle power, is to work towards maintaining a prioritised place under the American AI umbrella, not the Chinese one, due to the wider military and geopolitical risks this carries. This will be hard to negotiate and renegotiate over time, and we should be under no illusions that Washington will not drive a hard bargain.
Though we have many strengths, there are currently real weaknesses in our position. We cannot make advanced chips. We cannot build a frontier model at the current scale through domestic capital. Instead, what we do have is talent (and the ability to attract the most talented people globally), a serious research base, capital markets that still function, a legal system the world trusts, and a common language of technological development. We can develop relationships with countries where we are weaker and where they have significant technological strengths across the AI stack. This will mean working with the South Koreans, Taiwanese, Dutch and Norwegians. Access to the frontier, and the technologies at it, will be critical, and Britain should not cling to historical alliances when considering how it should act.
Rejoining should not be flung about as an answer to the complex and fast-moving problems posed by the current AI age. Success for Britain will mean building incredible companies that capture value across the AI stack — therefore, tying ourselves to a continent defined by a lack of said companies is an error.

In The Critic, Philip Cunliffe questions whether Britain is getting value from our alliances anymore.

Boosted by powerful allies, deep state bureaucrats gain more sway within our own political system, to the extent that they even feel empowered to set the agenda independently of elected officials. Witness the recent speech by the director-general of MI5, Ken McCallum, in which he demanded greater coordination across academia, the security services and the public in favour — pointedly — of defending national security. But what if our national interests no longer conform to the model of national security promoted by MI5?
Whatever the wisdom of Andy Burnham’s cynical calculations over targeting the West Bank settlements, it is very clear that we should not be in any position where we allow intelligence-sharing and national security to be at loggerheads with our national interest. Instead of merely defending the legacy structures of national security, we should be thinking about how we reassert national interest in a transformed world order.
With that in mind, do we have any national interests at stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? How does an alliance with Israel or indeed Palestine, further Britain’s interests? These are the questions we should be asking. Instead of cultivating dependence on foreign intelligence agencies, we should be re-evaluating our national interests in a world order that demands more self-sufficiency — self-sufficiency that should apply to our intelligence agencies as much as the economy, or critical raw materials.

For The Spectator, Eliot Wilson warns that our influence in NATO is diminishing due to a lack of investment in defence.

Money buys influence because it represents both hard-power capability and intent. The UK for decades enjoyed enormous influence in Nato. Partly this was the legacy of our having persisted throughout the Second World War – we were a combatant from 3 September 1939 to 2 September 1945 – and of our status as a founding member of the alliance in 1949; partly it was because our armed forces were often very good. But Britain also put its money where its mouth was. At its peak, the British Army of the Rhine numbered 80,000 soldiers and 800 main battle tanks; our defence expenditure did not fall below 4 per cent of GDP until the end of the Cold War.
Our clout in Nato is waning. We still, by convention, provide the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, currently Air Chief Marshal Sir Johnny Stringer, and host the headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) at Imjin Barracks in Gloucester. In the event of a conflict, we are committed to providing two warfighting divisions, the 1st (UK) Division and 3rd (UK) Division to Nato’s overall land forces. No one believes we could generate those formations at full strength in a remotely helpful timeframe.
Sir Keir Starmer preened himself over his ‘Coalition of the Willing’ for an undefined role in Ukraine which never emerged. His successor would struggle even to construct that kind of paper tiger. We are failing to keep up with our Nato allies on defence spending, and, worse, we are still in denial about that failure.

Wonky Thinking

The Centre for Policy Studies has published the latest analysis of patents filed within the United Kingdom and found that patent filing has declined significantly since the 1990s despite patent issuing rising in the rest of the world. The analysis concludes that the government needs to boost the attractiveness of the UK for businesses to grow, not just spend money on R&D. Key findings include:

The average number of patents filed annually with the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has declined from roughly 29,000 in 1990s to 21,000 post-2010, even as filings in South Korea, the United States, Singapore and China have multiplied several times over
In 2000, the UK produced 727 patent applications per million people. Today, that figure has fallen to 677, a 7% decline
Despite world-class universities and a strong science base, Britain produces fewer patents per person than most major economies, including France, Germany, Sweden, and the United States
Foreign inventors now file 61% fewer patents in Britain than in 1980 — a sign that global firms no longer see the UK as a key market to protect innovation
Technology-related patents have remained virtually flat for two decades, even as global filings have surged
The UK has fallen out of the world’s top five in the Global Innovation Index for the first time in over a decade

The report concludes:

If firms do not see Britain as a competitive place to build, test and scale, no amount of top-down government planning will change that. Businesses may simply find it easier to develop, test or commercialise elsewhere.
In conclusion, before announcing yet another strategy or fund, the Government should ask a more fundamental question: what conditions make firms choose to innovate or perform commercial R&D in Britain at all? A genuine science and technology superpower cannot be built by public spending alone. It requires an economy where businesses see long-term value in creating, protecting and commercialising their innovations on British soil. Until policymakers confront these underlying conditions, every new strategy risks repeating the same pattern: ambitious targets, generous incentives, and disappointing results.

Podcast of the Week

On WARZONES, James Glancy and Tom Sharpe discuss Russia’s naval threat to Britain’s undersea cables as well as the situation in the Falklands and what we can do, if anything, to protect the islands from renewed Argentinian aggression.