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Mark Carney’s speech in Davos on the end of the world order is rightly being hailed as one of the most powerful interventions by any political leader in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House. My social media feed and WhatsApp groups have been filled with veterans of past Davos gatherings telling me it was the most important speech they had ever heard delivered in the Swiss mountain town – or indeed expect to hear this year.
The Canadian Prime Minister’s argument tempered brutal realism— “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition” —with optimism. He set out a way that middle powers such as Canada, Britain and other advanced economies can maintain some sovereignty and control over their own destinies in a new era of superpower rivalries. His speech was an eloquent call for middling powers to work together to face down the great powers whose trashing of global rules and weaponisation of dependencies had turned integration into a source of subordination.
Carney was better placed than anyone in the world to have delivered such a speech. As one of the high priests of the global financial system over the last two decades – having previously served as Governor of the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England – he will have no illusions about the costs of the collapse of the old rules-based order. What’s more, as Prime Minister of a country whose own territory it is the stated policy of the US president to annex- and which would be encircled by America if Trump succeeds in his ambition of seizing Greenland – he surely feels both the gravity and urgency of the moment keenly.
It’s Time for an Apology From the Trump Apologists
The politicians and commentators who mocked those warning about the threat posed by the US President as being “hysterical” need to face up to their own role in the calamity now unfolding, argues Adam Bienkov
Adam Bienkov
But above all, Carney understands what is at stake with greater clarity than other world leaders because he has been thinking about these issues for longer. As Governor of the Bank of England, he watched as Britain committed what he privately considered to be a monumental act of stupidity with Brexit. He appeared to allude to the lessons he took from that experience in his speech, noting that “the cost of strategic autonomy and sovereignty can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortress. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sums.”
What is depressing is that it is almost impossible to imagine Keir Starmer or any other British political leader delivering such a speech, even assuming they understood the arguments. Starmer himself, no doubt, is keenly aware of the dangers of this moment and the risk to Britain’s national interest posed by a rogue United States. But he is incapable of articulating them, paralysed by his own timidity and buoyed by overconfidence in his capabilities as a “Trump whisperer” who can convince the capricious US President to change course.
Besides, in his decade at the front rank of UK politics, Starmer has never delivered a single notable speech. Indeed, the only memorable phrase ever to pass his lips—a claim that Britain was becoming an “island of strangers”—had such obvious racist connotations that he was later obliged to disown it. As for the rest of the British political class, one detects little sign that either of the two parties currently leading in the polls – Reform and the Conservatives – have any understanding of the consequences of this moment of rupture for Britain, of the costs that Carney rightly warns countries will have to incur to boost their resilience, and of the trade-offs that will be required as the price of preserving some autonomy.
This is partly a reflection of what has happened to British politics i…