The nation’s state

Did any of us, whatever our opinions, expect the level of blustering indignation that has emerged since the 2016 referendum? It seems to be reaching ever new heights — or depths — of invective and reciprocal disdain. On one side, ‘fantasists, crackpots, dunderheads… jabbering braggarts’ (as a Telegraph columnist described Leave MPs last week). On the other, a gaggle of ‘enemies of the people’, cowards and time-servers.

Not so long ago, the sophisticated laughed that only a few eccentrics ‘banged on’ about Europe. Now we seem to have become a nation of head-bangers. As social media spreads extreme and insulting language far and wide, it is easy to think that we are in the midst of an unprecedented cultural war. Families are split, it seems, and old friendships ended. I’m reminded of the dramatic occasion in 1791 in the Commons when the Whig leader Charles James Fox and his friend and ally Edmund Burke fell out over the French Revolution.

But we don’t need to go back as far as the Terror — a real clash of cultures, and with thousands of corpses to prove it — to realise that our present tantrums are relatively trivial. The Suez Crisis of 1956, alluded to by Jo Johnson, was more bitterly divisive and more serious in its causes and consequences: a conspiracy to launch an illegal attack on another country, a full-scale invasion and a forced climbdown when sterling nearly collapsed. Or what about when our embassy in Dublin was burnt down by an angry mob in 1972? When the coal miners reduced the country to a three-day week in 1974 and destroyed the government? Or the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1978 when corpses could not be buried? When the Thatcher government was nearly blown up in 1984 in the biggest act of terrorism since 1605? Or the miners’ strike of 1985, with violence and arrests unequalled since the 19th century?

And now? We are planning to leave an international trading organisation and trying to work out our future relations with it.