Do you feel safe?

Instruments of "strength" - a warship, a bomb - aren't protecting us against coronavirus. Is it time to rethink what will make us secure?

The Red Button Club. A new, non-partisan group for progressives looking to start a debate about what British foreign policy should look like over the next decade and how we might get there.

This piece was informed by informal discussions we’ve hosted over the past fortnight. We’ll be hosting more in the coming weeks. So if you’re interested in being part of a conversation about the UK’s foreign policy, this is the only red button you should be pressing:

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Take off your shoes. Remove your jacket. Place your laptop separately in a tray. Dispose of your poorly-timed purchase of water. 

Do you remember the time when safety measures were something we mainly did at an airport?

That’s the past.

Now some of us can’t see our loved ones before they die. We can’t do something as simple as have dinner with our friends. We’re even on high-alert in the supermarket.

Even if things were to go back to the way they were before (they won’t), our understanding of what it means to feel safe has changed.

It didn’t have to be this way though. Our leaders and institutions, in the UK, and all around the world, failed us. They were told, again and again and again, that a global pandemic was coming. But they failed to prevent the preventable.

And then, even when it was clear that we were in one, we all watched, mouths gaping wide open, as a slow motion motorway pile up took place in front of us: country after country crashing into the coronavirus, each driver’s hands locked to the wheel, each unable to change direction despite having just witnessed exactly what was going to happen to them.

You’re not that surprised though, are you?

Time and again, those who govern have demonstrated their inability to prevent problems from materialising or change direction when things aren’t working: the military interventions in the name of counter-terrorism that evidence could clearly show would make things worse, the tweak here and there in response to the global financial crisis, the ‘maybe it will just go away’ approach to global migration, and, of course, the head in the sand climate policies.

But this time it’s different. Whoever you are, wherever you are, the spread of the coronavirus is changing your life.

For a minority of us it will be catastrophic. For most of us it will be the economic shocks that hit hardest.

What was over there, is now here. The coronavirus may have come from abroad, but now it's in our homes; foreign policy is quite literally domestic policy, the line between the two erased. Indeed, all we have now is our coronavirus policy. 

We have failed - as a society and as a country - to invest in our real security, and we are paying a tragic price.

The venue that hosted 2019 UN climate change talks in Madrid being converted into a hospital (credit).

Immediate preventable deaths. An economic shock that there is no benchmark for in living memory. Unknown knock-on effects that will shape all of our lives.

Those tasked with ensuring our security have viewed their responsibility through the narrow prism of law and order, of military might. 

That’s why, again, we’re being told that we’re “in a war”. Our weapon systems might be top notch, our nuclear program might be state of the art, and our counter-terror capabilities might be unrivalled, but how is any of that keeping us safe right now? 

The emperor is armed to the teeth but he has no clothes. 

Now is the moment that it might be tempting to heed the call of the nativists and pull up the drawbridge and keep the world out.  

But an insular response will only shrink this island, and we – you, everyone – should want to grow back stronger together.

While there are lots of unknowns, there is one great big known. There is no way out of this situation unless we act collectively.

We know we won’t be safe from the virus until everyone is safe from it. Economies can’t function when borders are shut. Borders can’t be opened if some governments fail or do not have the capacity to put in place necessary public health measures. 

This might threaten us all, but some are more threatened than others. People living in refugee camps, those living under repressive regimes, women living in unsafe environments – these are just some of those who will suffer more than others from this ‘equalising’ virus. 

Whether and how we support those most in need of help - domestically and internationally - will shape the kind of world that we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in.

And that is just dealing with the immediate issue, putting aside the economic and political reverberations coming down the tracks. Unless we come together now, as a global community, we know the worst is yet to come.

This is a change moment. There could not be a more critical juncture in our lifetimes, perhaps for a generation. We have the opportunity to reshape the world as happened from 1919 and 1945 - but this time thankfully without the trauma of war.

We shouldn’t be waiting for the dust to settle under the weight of the old status quo - the old way of doing foreign policy, the old way of seeing threats, the old way of engaging in the world. 

The rule-book is done. Domestic politics in the UK is about to be totally redrawn, and so therefore must our foreign policy. 

It’s time for something new.

And while we cannot predict the future, we can prepare for it.

Here are 7 ideas to get started:

1. Reset the militarised means through which our leaders, foreign policy elites and bureaucracies manage risk. Yes, China and Russia pose threats, and yes the world is a scary place. But the balance of our foreign policy investments need to reflect the risks that matter to most people in this country. Progressives need to move beyond ideas such as protecting 0.7% and past a blind faith in existing multilateral institutions that are well in need of reform, replacement or retirement. We cannot compete with the nativists by resorting to the ideas and institutions of globalists-past.

2. Put the well-being of UK citizens at the heart of Britain's international engagement. We shouldn’t be shy about this: for too long the progressive left has failed to properly communicate why caring about people and events on the other side of the world matters to British people: coronavirus has created an open goal on this front. Voters are proud when the UK stands up for what is right, but internationalism will only be as strong as its resonance with people’s domestic realities. And these realities will continue to be affected by the world: despite what they’re telling you, globalisation isn’t going to be put back into its box. 

3. Make prevention an organising principle. The world’s societies and the governments that represent them won’t agree on everything. However, the costly shocks from coronavirus will push our shared interest in mitigating risks at the top of the agenda. We have a window of opportunity to institutionalise a preventive approach on an agreed set of core issues (e.g. pandemics, climate, migration, atrocities, financial stability). We should do this through creating independent organisations at domestic and international level, protected from day-to-day political interference and the horse trading of international politics.

4. Work to generational time frames. We cannot address global challenges until we escape the temporal straitjacket of political and media cycles. A truly preventive agenda thinks, acts and invests over decades and generations, not every 4-5 years or, worse, 4-5 hours.  This means thinking as a country and as a global community about how we better balance the distribution of costs and benefits across generations. This, in turn, requires a contract - and in some cases reconciliation - between those who are old today, those who are young today, and those who have not yet been born.

5. Be clear that crises are not levellers; but our responses can be. We may all be scared of coronavirus, but it will hurt some more than others. The poorest, frontline workers, vulnerable women, people displaced by conflict and others will all have a heavier burden to bear. It will be the same for other crises on the horizon, like the climate emergency (for which this pandemic is just a drill). Crises reveal and exacerbate inequalities, our political responses have the potential to equalise them. 

6. Direct the blossom of solidarity outwards: It’s powerful stuff: We are collectively organising to care for vulnerable neighbours we have never spoken to. We are coming to our windows to applaud our health service. We must amplify this solidarity so that it crosses borders: it's too easy for our individual societies to become more cohesive while relations between states become more polarised. A shared experience means that fertile channels exist to build solidarity.

7. Start treating the world as the system it is. Systems thinking is really hard; systems acting harder still. We need to figure out how to shift foreign policy institutions from working on individual problems to working on how different problems interact with one another; that’s where influence happens. We will also need to think about whole of society approaches to global engagement, where the state lays the infrastructure but the actors implementing are drawn from academia, businesses, communities, the media and beyond.

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If you’re interested in discussing this piece and sharing your own ideas about the UK’s foreign policy, we’re hosting online events in the coming weeks. Sign up below to hear more:

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