OSAKA –

How are the mighty fallen. In living memory Great Britain boasted an empire on which the sun never set, bigger and more global than even the Roman Empire. If you were privileged to claim to be a British citizen, you could invoke powerful protection against your oppressors wherever they might be hiding.

But in these troubled times the British government seems to be turning its back on the world. It has not forgotten Napoleon Bonaparte's claim that "England is a nation of shopkeepers" — but it is in danger of forgetting that the best shopkeepers today have to have a global comprehension.

Britain has been absent from discussions on the future of the euro and the possibility of Greece leaving the common currency (Grexit). The United Kingdom is not a euro member, but as an EU member and a global financial player, London should be closely involved in how the great political, economic and social drama plays out.

Prime Minister David Cameron and many leading lights of his Conservative Party, the senior partner in the government coalition, don't believe in the European Union or even in Europe. Their tragedy is that they do not have a strategy for Brexit (British exit of the EU). They fondly imagine that they can either reorder the 28-member EU to their own design, or walk away unscathed. It's pure cloud cuckoo land fantasy to think that remaining members of the EU club won't impose penalties.

More serious is the U.K. disappearance from talks about embattled Ukraine. Cameron has left it to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande to make the running for a peaceful negotiated settlement with Russia and the rebels, while U.S. hawks say Russia's Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted and needs a taste of his own military medicine.

The U.K.'s absence is striking because it was a signatory along with Ukraine itself, Russia and the U.S. — but not Germany or France or any other country — to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing security to Ukraine in exchange for surrendering the nuclear weapons on its soil and joining the nuclear nonproliferation treaty as a nonnuclear weapon state. At the time of the dissolution of the erstwhile Soviet Union, about a third of its nuclear arsenal plus design and production centers were in Ukraine.

In a departure from normal stiff upper lip British reticence of military men, Gen. Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy supreme allied commander Europe, blasted Cameron's absence from Europe's efforts to try to stop Ukraine sliding into conflict. "The U.K. is a major NATO member, it is a major EU member, it is a member of the UN Security Council, and it is unfortunate that the weight that the British prime minister could bring to efforts to resolve this crisis appears to be absent." Shirreff called his prime minister a "bit player" and a "foreign policy irrelevance."

British politicians are preoccupied with the upcoming general election. But previous Euroskeptic governments have compensated for their reluctance to commit to Europe by claiming a grander vision of Britain as a key partner in the Atlantic alliance; or as leader of the Commonwealth; or as a historically global power with major security and commercial ties way beyond Europe.

These pretensions have long ago been exposed: the U.S. prefers a strong U.K. within Europe, but if Britain drops out, a strong German European economic and political partner is fine; other Commonwealth countries, notably India and South Africa, but also the old Dominions, Australia, Canada and even tiny New Zealand, find it condescending of the U.K. to claim leadership of their very differing world visions; and as a global power and exporter Germany carries more clout than the U.K.

What is different this time round is the lack of any global vision or commitment from Britain. On the wintry streets of London last week, the roar of construction work gouging holes in the ground for new plate glass towers to Mammon was disrupting traffic and life from Victoria to Oxford Street, from hitherto unfashionable Southwark to up and coming Spitalfields.

It is increasingly an uneven economic progress. The rich are enjoying a prosperity boom. The FT Weekend notes that nice houses in blooming Bath, Cheltenham and Oxford, can be snapped up for £4 million plus. Average house prices in London are £500,000, far beyond the means of all but the richest workers.

Britain is creating a huge underclass army of people desperately trying to cling on for dear life itself. Whether they can depends largely on if they have a job. With low wages and the increasing prevalence of zero hours contracts (where employers call only when they want you to come in, with no guarantees), even having a job often fails to butter the family bread.

Cameron and his finance hatchet man George Osborne are too busy looking for savage spending cuts to understand what will be left when they have finished. It may not be enough to fulfill their military and security commitments under NATO.

How insulting did Napoleon intend to be about the English shopkeepers: did he mean they could only count pennies, or was he being more magnanimous seeing Britain as a commercial power, as opposed to a land-owning country or military one? Cameron and Osborne are the petty, penny-counting shopkeepers, who fail to understand Britain's place in the world or articulate what it stands for.

This was revealed in Britain's washing its hands of any residual responsibility for Hong Kong in spite of signing the 1984 Joint Declaration with China promising to hand back the territory to Beijing in return for Beijing's pledges that Hong Kong would retain a special autonomous status for 50 years. In spite of Beijing's continuing alarums about evil foreign devils, Britain was happy to let Hong Kong go. It is ludicrous to imagine a British task force trying to take back Hong Kong, less that London might strong-arm China into giving Hong Kong true democracy: how, only by shaming it to do the right thing in China's own interests.

Discretion and silence may be better than Don Quixotic valor. But the British foreign office crossed the line in abject cravenness in declaring that Beijing's proposals for democracy in Hong Kong — basically where Beijing gets to choose the candidates and give the final blessing to the winner — are democratic in any real meaning of the word.

Cameron will be rewarded with the opportunity to kowtow to China's President Xi Jinping when he makes a state visit to the U.K. this year, a splendid opportunity for the U.K. to benefit from Chinese largesse to try to catch up with Germany, France and even Italy.

German exports to China are seven times those of the U.K.'s, and France sells twice as much.

VisitBritain, the country's tourism agency, has already jumped on the Chinese bandwagon. France, Italy and Germany lead the U.K. in attracting Chinese visitors. Chinese tourists are a big catch because, although Hong Kong has called them "locusts" and Thailand has complained of their unruly behavior, they love to spend on average $3,300 per person per trip — twice to four times as much as other tourists. That is a lot of money when more than 100 million Chinese tourists go abroad every year.

The tourist body tapped social media to ask Chinese to suggest Chinese names for 101 notable U.K. landmarks. Evidently the Chinese are busy shopping until they drop because although VisitBritain said "nearly 300 million" potential Chinese tourists were reached via social media, more than 2 million visited the campaign pages and almost 30 million Chinese watched the launch video, only 13,000 names were suggested over a 10-week period.

The Chinese names mostly lacked imagination. The '60s pop group The Beatles were given a Chinese name of Pi Tou Shi, which translates into "the gentlemen with long hair." The Welsh village with a long name — Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch — became Jian Feu Cun, meaning "Healthy lung village" because it takes a lot of puff to get the Welsh characters correct. The Shard, the shap glass tower in London, was called Zhai Xing Ta, "the tower that allows us to pluck stars from the sky." Scotland's Highland Games, became Qun Ying Hui, "the strong-man skirt party."

Earn a few more pennies, Cameron, but without a proper global partnership, Great Britain will sink into little English oblivion.

Kevin Rafferty is a British reporter and editor who has worked on five continents.