Cameron: Britain still a world power
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Prime Minister David Cameron Monday said Britain is still an influential world power, rejecting claims that the kingdom is in decline.
Cameron, fresh from a visit to China and the Group of 20 Summit held in Seoul, made the comments at Lord Mayor of London's banquet.
He noted "there are some who say that Britain is embarked on an inevitable path of decline, that the rise of new economic powers is the end of Britain's influence in the world, that we are in some vast zero-sum game in which we are bound to lose out, that our claim to the status of a major military power is now a sham and that we should be pulling back from our military engagements."
"I want to take this argument head on. Britain remains a great economic power. Show me a city in the world with stronger credentials than the city of London. Show me another gathering with the same line-up of financial, legal, accounting, communications and other professional expertise," Cameron said.
The banquet for leading government, financial, and company dignitaries is to celebrate the new Lord Mayor of the City of London, which is the financial heart of London.
The speech delivered at the banquet is one of the traditional set-piece speeches in a British prime minister's diary. Cameron chose to focus his 20-minute speech entirely on foreign policies.
This reflected both the recent controversy over Britain's reduced military spending, and Cameron's wish to move foreign policies forward as fast as domestic policies, analysts said.
Cameron's new coalition government came to power on May 11 in the wake of the inconclusive May 6 general election, in which no party won enough support to rule alone.
Cameron's right-wing Conservatives formed a coalition with the center-left Liberal Democrats, which was the first peace-time coalition in the country over 80 years.
The unusual government reflected the unusual times. Britain was badly hit by the global financial crisis, leaving several major banks crying for urgent government support and the economy into a deeper and longer decline since the 1930s.
As a result, the government spending ballooned as revenues dwindled.
Therefore, Cameron's government has set as its main task cutting the near-record public spending deficit of 156 billion pounds (about 240 billion U.S. dollars) over the coming four years.
Cuts in public spending have resulted in some government departments tightening their budgets by up to 25 percent over that period, with a predicted loss of 450,000 jobs in the public sector with almost the same in the private sector.
The military spending suffered a smaller cut than other areas, a reduction of 7.8 percent in the 37-billion-pound (about 55-billion-dollar) annual bill, which is itself dwarfed by spending on the National Health Service, education and welfare.
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