The New York Times does a piece on the new British Prime Minister a look and find’s the coun tries first leader of colour moving past the Boris Johnson a’la Donald Trump policies….
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has mothballed his predecessors’ projects, large and small, from Liz Truss’s trickle-down tax cuts to Boris Johnson’s revamped royal yacht. But one of Mr. Sunak’s most symbolic changes since taking over as prime minister five months ago has received less attention: retiring the slogan “Global Britain.”
No longer does the phrase, a swashbuckling relic of Britain’s debate over its post-Brexit role, feature in speeches by cabinet ministers or in the government’s updated military and foreign policy blueprint released last Monday.
In its place, Mr. Sunak has hashed out workmanlike deals on trade and immigration with Britain’s nearest neighbors — France and the rest of the European Union. In the process, analysts and diplomats said, he has begun, for the first time since Britain’s departure from the European Union, to chart a realistic role on the global stage.
Global Britain, as propounded by Mr. Johnson, was meant to evoke a Britain, unshackled from Brussels, that could be agile and opportunistic, a lightly regulated, free-trading powerhouse. In practice, it came to symbolize a country with far-fetched ambitions and, under Mr. Johnson, a habit of squabbling with its neighbors.
Mr. Sunak has changed all of that, with a pragmatic approach that, to some extent, reflects his button-down, technocratic style. (In domestic policy, he has also shunned the ideological experimentation of Ms. Truss and the bombastic politics of Mr. Johnson in favor of a more methodical approach to Britain’s deep-rooted economic problems.)
But a leader’s style matters, and on the world stage Mr. Sunak’s no-bombast approach is paying eye-catching dividends….
image…CBC