We need to break out of our cycle of doom, despair and decline to become a confident, outward-looking country again, says ANDREW FISHER
Our planet is more connected than ever.
We switch on the television and see events from all over the world. Atrocities are livestreamed through apps on our phones, with first-hand accounts bringing home to us the realities of war, natural disasters and extreme poverty.
Yet we’re also becoming more insular as a country. Ten years ago, we voted to leave the European Union, narrowly. Despite war, famine and extreme inequality, we have cut back massively on the amount of international aid we give – from 0.7% of our gross national income to just 0.3%. Successive governments have also reduced spending on diplomacy and the “soft power” of the BBC World Service.
Events continue to show how interconnected our world is – from the impact on Britain of wars in Ukraine and Iran, to climate change and the covid pandemic. No matter how hard we try, we cannot close the borders and pretend the rest of the world does not exist.
Yet there have been more positive visions for the world and our responsibilities within it.
In 1977, Robert McNamara, the president of the World Bank, suggested something called The Independent Commission on International Development Issues. The commission was chaired by Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of West Germany, so that when its report was published in 1980, it was known as The Brandt Report.
The report’s subtitle was “A programme for survival”.
At a time when global politics was defined by the Cold War, and East v West, The Brandt Report looked forward, towards the end of the century, and the potential for global economic conflict between the North and the South. It was a seminal work, perhaps one of the most important since the Second World War.
Brandt’s report recognised the interconnectedness of the world, as well as its divides.
He and his commission, whose members included former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath, worked out a plan to bridge those divides and make the world a more equal and harmonious place. More, fairer trade, and less charity. The report covered trade, migration and the rights of migrant workers, military spending, refugees, international aid and climate change.
The report’s authors were unanimous in their recommendations. “We have all come to agree that fundamental changes are essential, whether in trade, finance, energy or other fields, if we are to avoid a serious breakdown of the world economy… and to give it instead a new stimulus to function in the interests of the world’s people.”
Far-sighted: former German Chancellor Willy Brandt
Our actions contribute to the mess the world is in – whether it is our governments selling weapons to oppressive regimes or bombing other countries, or ourselves as consumers and our demand for energy and resources that contribute to wars, environmental degradation and climate change.
This week, Prime Minister Andy Burnham organised a COBR meeting due to the unprecedented heatwaves and months-long droughts that have afflicted the country in the hottest summer on record. This year, 2026, breaks the record from 2025, which was the hottest summer on record. Droughts, wildfires and deaths from extreme heat are no longer some rare, once-in-a-half-century occurrences like in the summer of 1976, but a regular feature of British summertime.
The impacts on work, productivity, food production, the NHS and other aspects of society are still being understood, but the think-tank Verdant estimates that “successive heatwaves from May to the end of July 2026 have an estimated economic cost of at least £4.4billionn”.
They explain “these losses are the result of reduced productivity due to the well-documented effect of all work becoming harder at higher temperatures, and that infrastructure and equipment overheat and fail. For each one-degree Celsius temperature increase above 30 degrees in Europe, a 3% reduction in average output per hour has been observed”.
Today, at a weather station at Kew, the temperature reached 38°C. In the shade.
Despite a long-held consensus among climate scientists, there remains prominent politicians in this country and abroad who are determined to deny the impact of the climate emergency, while some often taking back-handers from fossil fuel companies.
Tinder dry: Croydon’s Lloyd Park last week – with London being declared to be in drought a month ago
As predicted by The Brandt Report, climate change will inevitably produce more climate refugees – those affected by crop failure, desertification and drought.
Burnham, speaking from the clifftops of Dover last week. said he too – like his recent predecessors – would like to stop the boats.
But he also said something different: that part of the way to do that was to open safe and legal routes to get here. The only reason that people smugglers exist, and dozens perish in the Channel, is because we no longer have an orderly system of safe routes for refugees to get here.
Croydon South MP Chris Philp, has joined the likes of Robert Jenrick and Nigel Farage in doing silly stunts on boats in the Channel. Philp even claimed, somewhat hysterically, that the French Navy was shooting at him. The French authorities, with a shrug, said it was a routine training exercise. Signals were shown, safety rules followed and anyway, the British vessel, with its precious cargo the shadow home secretary, was well beyond firing range.
If Philp was so shaken after a few distant pops from a French naval exercise, he should reflect how he might feel if he’d fled years of war or persecution.
To put the refugee crisis in perspective, more than 100million people are displaced worldwide. About half are displaced within their home country. Of those fleeing, only a small proportion head to mainland Europe and of those, only a small proportion come to Britain. In recent years, the UK has had fewer refugees apply for asylum than Germany, France, Italy or Spain.
At the same time, Britain has been cutting back on the aid to support refugee camps in places like Turkey and Lebanon – while still sending weapons to human rights-abusing regimes, and also aiding and abetting the United States’ wars and bombing campaigns. Wars and bombing campaigns which have also created millions more displaced people and refugees.
On a cliff edge: PM Andy Burnham may not have read The Brandt Report
We have a small boats crisis. But we also have a small-mindedness crisis. And I think it’s tied up with our domestic failures, too.
Our country has been in a mess for a long time. Living standards have fallen, economic growth has been sluggish for nearly two decades. There’s not only a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, a social care crisis and a prisons crisis, but also huge backlogs in the NHS and in our courts system, too.
We don’t trust politicians to sort out our own country. After years of crap government, it’s hardly surprising that we’re no longer the confident outward-looking country which, a quarter of a century ago, doubled international aid and cancelled millions of debt from developing countries – at a time when the economy was growing and our living standards and public services were improving.
So we’ve turned inward, with all kinds of ghoulish politicians whipping up division at home and abroad.
We need to break out of this cycle of decline – economically and mentally – rejecting the prophets of doom, despair and division to become a confident, outward-looking country again.
Today’s politicians could do a lot worse than to start by reading The Brandt Report from 1980.
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- It’s a red card for those who use crime as a political football
- Burnham’s challenge is to rebalance Britain yet cherish London
- Perry has stabilised council finances in state of perpetual crisis
Andrew Fisher also conducts a podcast interview with a leading academic, sector expert or political figure. - Last month’s Andrew Fisher Interview was with Fiona Fletcher-Smith, the head of giant housing association L&Q, who has some forthright ideas about how to end, or at least reduce, the housing crisis.
- To hear this in-depth and informed interview, click here
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn
- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
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Andrew, while I generally agree with many of your opinions there are a couple with which I take slight issue.
The COBRA meeting takeaway for me was that packaged barbecues may be banned but the climate crisis wasn’t mentioned. And drilling of North Sea oil fields would still be expanded. This is not a serious response. I really hoped Burnham would do better.
Safe routes are really important and welcome but operationally we can no longer “bounce back” irregular migrants on the next ferry. The Brexit vote was to leave the European Union, not to abandon the single market. In 2016 EEA membership was the default position (which could have maintained the Dublin Convention returns agreement with France) but politicians, both Labour and Conservative, were whipped to vote for the hardest Brexit possible and thereby the “small boats crisis” and the avoidable deaths of countless men, women and children were almost inevitable.
Rejoining the EEA, addressing the climate crisis head on, building mass council housing and not jailing anti genocide protesters would immediately go a long way toward making this country a better place in which to live.
“We have a small boats crisis. But we also have a small mindedness crisis”.
Nail on head