Sir Vince Cable discusses shifting global power at Literary Festival

British politician and former leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir Vince Cable spoke about his most recent publication ‘Eclipsing the West: China, India and the forging of a new world’ at the Gibraltar Literary Festival.

Sir Vince Cable was interviewed by Government Press Officer Aaron Santos at Grand Battery House on Sunday afternoon.

The book hinges on the question whether China and India can continue rise as superpowers and eclipse the US in the future.

The book looks at the past and how this will influence the future of these “rapidly growing economies”.

Sir Vince highlighted that India is growing a rate of 6.7% a year, in comparison to the US which is at 2% annually.

For China, their population is four times the US resulting in an economy almost twice the size of the US.

But India is the one to look out for.

“What surprises a lot of people is that I've got India emerging as the second biggest economy in the world by [2025], basically on the basis that they continue doing what they've been doing for the last half century, which is despite all the obstacles in India, bureaucratic difficulties, their caste system, all the inefficiencies of government,” Sir Vince said.

“There's a saying in India that the economy grows at night when the government's asleep.”

“But it does grow, and I've seen it. I've been going there for 60 years.”

“The transformation is amazing and assuming that there isn't something, cataclysm and nuclear war, some horrible thing like that, that's what the world could well look like.”

Sir Vince described how he has a background in China and since retiring from Parliament five years ago he has taken up an academic post with the London School of Economics and University of Shenzhen.

He was tasked by former Prime Minister David Cameron to build relations with China during his time in government.

“This book, in a way, is incredibly vague. I mean, how can one person take on such a vast subject, and particularly the Chinese language?” Sir Vince said.

“But it was an attempt to draw together the threads of all this experience over the years and my research into it.”

He said one of the great strengths of China is how the government plans ahead.
“They think 20 years ahead,” Sir Vince said.

“They have been investing very heavily over a long period of time in these new growth industries. I think it's almost certainly the case that the Chinese are on a level with the Americans in terms of the application of artificial intelligence.”

He has read how China has introduced AI as part of the curriculum at primary and secondary level, adding how the country has “completely digitised” and India is following suit.

“You have this combination of poor countries becoming rich and also keeping ahead of the driving technologies, and it's very difficult to see how that will be derailed,” Sir Vince said.

He added that Britain’s global influence has shrunk, particularly since Brexit, and the country is being “pushed into a corner” where it would have to chose between the US or China and India.

Sir Vince said that the Make America Great Again project is changing the US.

He said the US in the future “will be much more inward looking, less interested in the rest of the world, more aggressive, probably on trade and other issues”.

“I think a lot of us hoped initially that Trump would be a bad dream and we'd wake up, we go back to normal,” Sir Vince said.

“But I do get a sense of that his people are a revolution, that they're actually fundamentally changing the United States for good.”

He added that the next US President will need to rebuild their relations with Europe.

Looking at Europe, Sir Vince said “Brexit did parallel harm to Britain”.

“We perhaps underestimate the extent to which it's done a lot of harm to the European Union,” he said.

“It's lost a lot of their confidence.”

He said the European Union is finding it difficult to find a common purpose.

Sir Vince said that “it's very difficult to make a case that Europe would be a third force”.

“Indeed, in my story, it's India that's the third force, not the European Union.”