"The UK", says @BorisJohnson, "rose to greatness because of our championing of global free trade." This is one of the core myths underpinning the ideology of "Global Britain", which I wrote about in the @NewStatesman in October. newstatesman.com/politics/uk/20…
@BorisJohnson @NewStatesman In Johnson's rather hazy vision of British history, a coercive military empire is recast as a champion of “free trade”, establishing entrepreneurialism, rather than empire, as the golden thread between past & present. That teaches the dangerous lesson that "nothing has changed". 
@BorisJohnson @NewStatesman The classic example of this is Liam Fox, who memorably told a gathering of Commonwealth Ministers in 2017 that what bound them all together was their shared history of free trade.
@BorisJohnson @NewStatesman One of the hard-learned lessons of the post-war era was that a country stripped of its colonies, its military power & its global financial dominance needed to cut its cloth differently for a post-imperial age. We are currently unlearning that lesson. This is unlikely to end well.
