Azeem Ibrahim: Why is Britain lacking purpose?

Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE is a Senior Director at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, a columnist for Foreign Policy, and the author of A Greater Britain: Rethinking the UK’s Global Strategy (2026)

‘Where do you see yourself in a decades time?’

It’s a classic interview question that Britain refuses to ask itself. Whether or not our leaders wish to call it ‘broken’, Britain’s predicament is now widely recognised, but rarely fully diagnosed. Growth is weak, public services are both weak and eye-wateringly expensive, and foreign policy is painfully reactive and diminished. Yet the standard responses remain managerial: issue reassurances that stability will eventually deliver results as taxes inexorably rise.

It’s true that the accumulated weight of past decisions – the courts, bureaucracies, quangocracies and regulations – makes delivery hard. It’s true that most of the anger in British politics is wasted in that it drives political energy into policy and politicians that can’t deliver. What is missing from these diagnoses is that it is not just competence, but purpose that Britain lacks.

Purpose is something that neither referendum results nor successive election victories can guarantee. Purpose and vision can only be drawn from years of clear and intentional persuasion both of the electorate and of the governing class. 2019 (and 2024) proves that a large majority can be won that nonetheless fails to cut through the many layers of state inertia.

As a professor of foreign policy, the core goal of A Greater Britain, my book releasing this week, is to do that crucial analytical legwork to build a credible vision for the UK starting, and ending, in a renewed international role. The book begins from the fashionable premise: that decline is not accidental, nor inevitable, but the product of incentives, institutions, and a governing culture that has lost confidence in prosperity, power, and can no longer even coherently define, let alone act in, the national interest is. Britain is not uniquely unlucky.

Instead, post-Brexit, it is uniquely reluctant to decide what it is for, and is stuck in the political status quo built before the financial crisis by Tony Blair. Internationally, Britain is unwilling to commit to the logic of Brexit, nor of the authoritarian century we face, and so is unable to play the mediating role we are manifestly capable of.

For decades, Britain benefitted enormously from the post-war international order it helped to construct. Open trade, American security guarantees, and relatively stable institutions allowed us to become a highly globalised, high-wage, service-led economy. That world is now fracturing.

The liberal order is no longer self-sustaining; authoritarian states are coordinating; international institutions are increasingly paralysed or weaponised. Power is once again exercised directly rather than concealed behind norms and legalism. Yet Britain continues to behave, naïvely, as though the old system will carry on doing the work for us. No. We will have to earn our place in the new world order.

A Greater Britain argues that prosperity is not merely a domestic economic question, but the foundation of power and the only coherent end of our foreign policy. Britain’s economic stagnation and its foreign policy drift are two sides of the same failure. We, unfortunately, have no plan for what we want and so the question of how  we must act is endlessly deferred. We lose every negotiation we embark upon because we don’t, at the most basic level, know where we hope to be in a decade’s time.

This is why A Greater Britain argues that Britain must think of itself as a specialised intermediary power. Poised between the United States, EU, and with historic and linguistic links with more than half the entire world’s population. We are no longer a superpower, but nor are we condemned to irrelevance. Britain’s remaining advantages lie in finance, law, technology, research, diplomacy, and convening power. These assets remain diffuse and accidental, and are not aligned in service of our strategy. Britain spends enormously to build international credibility, yet, similarly, has no idea how to use or leverage it.

Power has to be understood and leveraged. Indeed, as James Cleverly observed when he served as Foreign Secretary, we build credibility to serve our national interest. We do not sacrifice our national interests, like on Chagos, to build credibility. Yet successive governments do not have a playbook for when to cave in and when to insist.

Part of the book’s answer is the Knowledge Power Doctrine. It combines the economics of specialisation with the hard fact of our new authoritarian world. Britain already generates a disproportionate share of the world’s innovation and capacity on finance, security, climate, law, and governance. Yet this intellectual capital is rarely converted into influence or leverage.

The doctrine shows how to do precisely that: integrate research, standards, institutions, and expertise into statecraft so that Britain shapes agendas rather than merely responds to them. Now that our hard coercive power is outmatched, this is how we can adapt to continue projecting influence.

Once an international role that aims at prosperity – our guiding purpose – is established, we will have the momentum to reform domestically: collapsing investment, infrastructure paralysis, capital flight, weak productivity, and a growing exodus of talent.