
For diehard Brexiters, the most potent image of their project is the “clean break”. It is in itself a rather attractive notion, especially in our culture of personal make-overs and radical transformations. Brexit is the New You. It proposes a Year Zero and an Independence Day – points of origin at which a whole other story of British greatness begins. Like most revolutions, it imagines a sloughing off of history, especially, of course, the history of half a century of deep entanglement with the European Union. It offers a free programme of collective rehab, a political version of the Scientologists’ goal of “going clear”.
Yet one of the many incoherences of the Brexit project is that it cannot sustain even this rhetoric of a magical escape from the past. It proposes a giant leap into a glorious future but, as the Anglo-Irish philosopher Johnny Rotten snarled more than 40 years ago, “there is no future in England’s dreaming”. What is to follow from the great rupture has always been fuzzy. There is, instead, an awful lot of past.
There is Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ecstatic effusion at the Tory conference in 2017: “We need to be reiterating the benefits of Brexit! ... Oh, this is so important in the history of our country … It’s Waterloo! It’s Crécy! It’s Agincourt! We win all these things!” There is the same genius’s laugh-a-minute literary pageant The Victorians, whose dead white males are paraded as the exemplars and progenitors of the post-Brexit future. There are Boris Johnson’s literary and rhetorical Churchill impersonations. There are the zombie refrains of empire in the dream of Global Britain.
Above all, there is the constant harking back to the second world war, to the Dunkirk spirit and the blitz spirit and, more darkly, to a rhetoric (aimed at the infidels) of appeasement, collaboration and, in Johnson’s endlessly repeated term for the Benn act that sought to prevent a no-deal exit, of surrender. In a plaintive appeal to party members last April, the Tories’ great lost leader Matt Hancock (remember him?) agonised that “we have got to sound like we actually like this country. We have got to be patriots of the Britain of now and not the Britain of 1940.” But neither the Britain of now nor the putative future Britain can hold a candle to the imagined flame of past glory.
In this mixed-up discourse, the Brexit project can’t decide whether it is a revolution or a restoration. If, like the characters in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, it has an animal daemon to represent its true self, is it a beautiful butterfly emerging from the cocoon of European slavery or a homing pigeon returning to the comfortable roost of old England?
It wants, perhaps, to be both, to suggest simultaneously that all things will be made new in the buccaneering, disruptive, hyperglobalised capitalism that will be unleashed once freedom is gained; and that everything is just going back to the way it was meant to be before the terrible mistake of 1973. In this sense, the contradictory notions of history also expose the much deeper contradiction of Brexit – for most of those who are driving it, it is a radical breach in the British postwar social order; for most of those in the back of the bus, it is supposed to be a refurbishment and strengthening of that same social order.
Complicating all of this is the way the very potency of the idea of a restoration of the past is itself a restoration of the past. As David Reynolds points out in his concise, elegant and lucid revisiting of key themes in British history in the light of Brexit, Margaret Thatcher, in her very first election campaign, when she was just 24, said: “Britain’s prestige in the eyes of the world has gone down and down … it is our earnest desire to make Great Britain great again.” That was in 1950, just after the triumph of the second world war and before the shock of the Suez crisis. Yet here, in this proto-Trump rhetoric, there is already the notion of intolerable national decline: if British greatness has to be regained, it has by definition been lost.
Decline – or rather declinist rhetoric – is one of Reynolds’s four themes. As an overriding notion in British political psychology, it has the odd quality of being at once inevitable and irrelevant. Inevitable because “greatness” as defined by the empire was an extraordinary episode of political gigantism. Great Britain became Greater Britain as a result of a historically freakish conjunction of circumstances. It could not possibly sustain a situation in which it accounted for 33% of the world’s exports of manufactured goods or one in which it controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s population.
But this inevitable retreat is irrelevant because Britain’s descent from these impossible heights went hand-in-hand with great improvements in the lives of its own inhabitants. Given a choice between continuing to hold India captive and building a National Health Service, there is little doubt that ordinary people in Britain would have chosen the dignity of good healthcare over imperial “greatness”.
Reynolds gives a nicely crisp account of all of this but he might have risked a further thought. If it is true that a story of relative decline does not really matter to most people so long as their own circumstances are improving, then perhaps when people’s lives stop improving, as they did as a result of static wages and austerity, they become susceptible to declinism. Their lives, they may come to accept, are not great because Britain is no longer great. This sleight-of-mind is surely one of the central and most effective tactics of Brexit. It suggests that membership of the EU, in which Britain is “reduced” to the normality of being one country among 28, is the real reason why people’s own life chances have been reduced.
It is possible to make this false connection because of Reynolds’s second theme, the persistent ambivalence in English politics about whether or not it is possible to stand aloof from continental Europe. It goes back a long way, certainly more than 1,000 years, and even in the postwar era, it has weighed heavily on both main parties. It is good to be reminded by Reynolds that even in the infamous Bruges speech of 1988 that gave its name to the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory party, Thatcher insisted starkly: “Our links to the rest of Europe, the continent of Europe, have been the dominant factor in our history.” (Not, note, empire, industrialism or Protestantism, which she might have chosen.) And equally that it was a Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who insisted in 1962 that “we are not just a part of Europe – at least not yet. We have a different history.” Here we see that the very notion of British history has long been deeply uncertain: is it fundamentally shaped by Europe or is it “different”?
One great appeal to difference is the profound exceptionalism that was seemingly endorsed by imperial success, the notion, as the historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay put it in 1833 of the British as a “people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and intellectual light”. But the other is the history that the Brexiters have been most anxious to ignore: the complex, fraught and often violent nature of the interrelationships of England, Scotland, Wales and of course Ireland.
There is here not history but histories. The “island story” is neither; it pertains not to an island but to an archipelago and it contains multiple, shifting and sometimes competing narratives. Reynolds provides a very useful primer on the delusions of an English mentality in which, as John Pocock put it in a ground-breaking essay in 1974, the Welsh, Scots and Irish “appear as peripheral peoples when, and only when, their doings assume the power to disturb the tenor of English politics”.
This myopia has been inextricable from the delusion of a “clean break”. The “peripheral peoples” of the Irish borderlands have been the ghosts at the Brexit feast and their insistence on being heard has radically changed the tenor of English politics. Johnson’s deal with Brussels, which essentially jettisons Northern Ireland, can be seen as a last desperate attempt to go clear from history. But even if it succeeds, the Scots, the Welsh and even the English may prove to have historical imperatives of their own that cannot be wished away.
• Island Stories by David Reynolds is published by William Collins (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
