Niall Ferguson got me thinking about this in his Sunday Times piece, in which he rejected the allure of Brexit and declared himself an ‘Anglosceptic’. He concluded: ‘In the days before empire, Henry VIII’s version of Brexit was to renounce Roman Catholicism and divorce Catherine of Aragon. A true sceptic in those days would have advised him to Bremain — and unite against the Turk.’
It’s an odd choice of illustration, because in that case Brexit did work, it paved the way for a stronger braver England, then Britain. It was the making of us. Tudor history is surely a precedent in the Brexiters’ favour.
So can Boris dress up as Henry VIII, so to speak, and paint Brussels as Rome? In a sense he is doing exactly this, when he talks of sovereignty. Henry’s Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 declared England to be ‘an empire unto itself’, meaning a sovereign nation that must reject alien laws coming from another European city.
Brexiters attack bureaucracy and absurd Euro-laws about condoms, in just the way that reformers attacked canon law and absurd claims about relics and saints. We can be free of all this nonsense! We can rule ourselves and then common sense will prevail!
But there’s a big difference. Brexit will not bring a new sense of national unity. It will not re-energise us ideologically. This is what inclines me to share Ferguson’s Angloscepticism. Brexit seems to be fuelled by a hope that a new burst of national purpose and unity is available. I just don’t think it is, at least not by this means. It’s the West as a whole that needs ideological re-energizing. Let the bold brains of Gove and Johnson et al raise their sights. More ambition, please – of another sort.
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