Britain and the need for self-definition

Promising "stability and moderation," the United Kingdom's new prime minister, Keir Starmer, declared that his country needed a "bigger reset, a rediscovery of who we are."

However predictable such words may be, when the speaker has just won elections by a landslide, ending his rivals' 14-year term in power, with the country seeking direction, these objectives take on special significance. Britain has been transformed by many years of austerity, by Brexit, by the pandemic, through consecutive political storms which led the Conservative Party to change prime minister five times in eight years. Relations between various groups in the country are tense, relations with the rest of the world are in flux. Stability and moderation, a reboot and a new self-definition are precisely what Britain needs. 

It is what every country needs. The European Union is stumbling, with the...