“No wonder the sun never set on the British empire, because even God would not trust the English in the dark,” went one of Shashi Tharoor’s best zingers from his viral speech at the Oxford Union debate. Well, the English must have grown trustworthy and non-threatening since then, because a melancholic darkness now looms over Britain’s status as a global power.

The most recent symptom of Britain’s shrinkage from the world is another round of funding squeeze at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) — it announced over 1,000 job cuts in July. Since its inception in 1922, the BBC has been an important tool of British foreign policy, influencing global opinion-makers, particularly the English-speaking elites of the erstwhile colonies in Asia and Africa.

“If a communal riot broke out, or if the monsoon had failed, it was the BBC that gave us the most reliable, up-to-date news,” wrote Ramachandra Guha recently in The Guardian , criticising the BBC job cuts. “Not surprisingly, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, the BBC broke the news of her death hours before the AIR did.”

The likes of Guha, the post-colonial elite, grew up with an aspirational Britishness via their transistors, as they listened to The Beatles, Test cricket and unmatched global news coverage on the BBC. Through this generation of Commonwealth coconuts (brown outside, white inside), the Empire, or at least its propaganda, lived on much after it had died.

In the former colonies, the BBC World Service manufactured a Western consent around global issues, which helped British foreign policy punch above its actual weight. By setting the international standards for journalism, by dominating public discourse and information, widely perceived as being “independent and accurate” compared to the “compromised and unreliable” local news sources, the BBC subtly helped push the British agenda across the world. And sometimes this connect between foreign policy and BBC journalism was not even subtle, and its influence was not restricted to the former colonies.

“The BBC World Service was the principal means of engaging listeners behind the Iron Curtain, who were otherwise unreachable, and challenging the authoritarian leaderships of Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War,” according to historian Dr Alban Webb, author of the 2014 book titled London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War . “The government, primarily through the Foreign Office, took a very close interest in the World Service, not just because it funded it, but also because it was considered such an important tool in getting the British point of view heard throughout the world.”

But neither the British public nor the current Tory government seem to believe that the “British point of view” is important to the world anymore. According to several polls, Britons find the £145.50 compulsory and annual BBC licence fee outdated. With traditional media models disrupted by the digital shift, with social media dominating the new discourse, the need for a publicly funded broadcaster has diminished. In 2016, when the BBC charter comes up for renewal, a radical overhaul in funding is expected, which would lead to an even smaller BBC.

And ‘small’ is what best describes Britain’s overall thinking now. As David Cameron and the Conservatives got re-elected earlier this year, journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote a stinging article in The Washington Post titled “Britain resigns as a world power”. Britain is becoming as important as Luxembourg in international affairs, he wrote, with a smaller army, reduced global thinking, and led by a parochial government whose prime minister’s first speech since re-election reflected that small thinking.

“Confronting a world of challenges — including Greece’s possible exit from the euro, a massive migration crisis on Europe’s shores, Ukraine’s perilous state, Russia’s continued intransigence, the advance of the Islamic State and the continuing chaos in the Middle East,” wrote Zakaria, “Cameron chose to talk about a plan to ensure that hospitals in the United Kingdom will be better staffed on weekends.”

The rise of China, India and other emerging economies over the past decade has resulted in a big shift in global power, in which Europe and Britain have come out net losers.

Even in Washington’s pecking order, the focus has decisively moved to Asia Pacific, with the US reaching out to Japan and India to tackle China, which it now sees as its main threat. Britain, often lampooned as the primary satellite of American foreign policy, is no longer that special in the State Department either.

So while many will be upset over the shrinking of the BBC, it will now have to share space with global broadcasters from Russia, China and Qatar, in line with the changing world order. The heady days of ‘Cool Britannia’ are over. ‘Small Britannia’ is now here to stay.

(Disclosure: The writer was a BBC employee between 2007-2011.)

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian

Follow Sambuddha on Twitter@some_buddha

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