These polemics against Brexit both fall into the same trap

It is good for historians to take the plunge into political writing, using their knowledge where they can to illuminate our present predicament. I declare an interest: I have tried it myself, on the other side of the debate. One has to be open with the reader as to one’s intentions and willing to expose one’s own opinions to the test of evidence. Otherwise, the result is something like these intriguingly confused and confusing books, which are really polemics against Brexit while purporting to be something else. Though very different in style and assumptions, their prejudices lead to the same intellectual dead end.

Bernard Porter is a distinguished historian of immigration and imperialism and the author of an excellent book demonstrating that few people in Britain bothered much about the empire – heresy in today’s climate of decolonisation.

His present style is a fruity hybrid of Queen Victoria and Mr Podsnap, with lavish use of italics, brackets and scare quotes. It reads as though it was dictated and never corrected. Perhaps it was. Porter disarmingly pleads that during lockdown he was stuck in Sweden, his present home, with no access to books or notes, but Bloomsbury could surely have edited out repetitions, errors and contradictions.

Though his knowledge of the complexities of imperial history means that he has little time for ‘statue spoilers’, his ‘lessons for patriots’ constitute a stern diet of debunking to deflate patriotic (or as he writes ‘patriotic’) histories of Britain (or ‘Britain’). So the tone is generally negative. He is of course sniffy about Churchill and finds it difficult to understand working-class patriotism. 

Britain was philistine: ‘European visitors… didn’t generally come to admire its painting.’ That would have surprised Delacroix, criticised for his ‘English’ style, and Monet, ‘the French Turner’. First world war ‘conchies’, he says, were imprisoned (in fact few were). Chamberlain was right about appeasement, as we would have lost the war in 1938 (a judgment few specialists now accept). And it was really won by Russia anyway (a view that ignores recent research).