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.
Brexiteers, when not moved by ‘plain stupidity’, are fascists
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). On a more
positive note, he admires ‘the almost saintly
Jeremy Corbyn’, and repeatedly assures us
that Marx was right. Debunking aside, his
overarching theme is that Britain is pathologically obsessed by its history.
He makes strenuous efforts to be, or at
least to appear, even-handed, which means
long sentences with thickets of conditional sub-clauses. When he gets on to Brexit,
however, the view becomes crystal clear,
despite the verbal camouflage. He loathes
Eton, Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg (not really ‘top notch class-wise’). Brexiteers, when
not moved by ‘plain stupidity’, are fascists.
Typically, he hedges: fascism is perhaps ‘not a very exact term’, but ‘more and more commentators’ (such as Hillary Clinton) discerned ‘features of proto-fascism’. Some
may read this as scrupulous attention to
accuracy; others as mud-slinging by proxy.
Hannah Rose Woods comes from a recent
generation, and her book is very different yet
intriguingly similar. There is nothing of the
Old Left about it, and passing remarks suggest she applauds ‘statue spoilers’. Its pedigree is the ‘cultural turn’, which at its least
demanding means thinking up an abstract theme and embroidering it with examples.
Woods also adopts the novelty of writing
history backwards, beginning in 2021 and
ending up in the 16th century. I don’t think it
makes much difference, as the simple argument is the same from end to beginning:
‘Nostalgia’ is the dominant characteristic of
British (mostly English) culture.
‘It can seem as if Britain is a nation
obsessed by history,’ she writes, echoing
Porter. It certainly can seem that if the author
chooses to demonstrate it by forcing a wide
variety of phenomena into a Procrustean bed
of nostalgia. Protestantism – nostalgia for
primitive Christianity. Catholicism – also
nostalgia. Admiration for the classics: nostalgia. Building Palladian country houses,
ditto – and Gothic Revival ones too. Modern art and sexual liberation have nostalgia
lurking somewhere. The Green movement is
somehow omitted. Almost every reference to
the past is labelled nostalgia. The list seems endless, as eventually does this harping on
a single chord.
Individual parts of the book are quite lively and though much of it is familiar (Horace Walpole, William Morris, John Ruskin,
Edward Carpenter et al.) not all of it is. The
best part is on late-19th-century urban fears,
seemingly drawing on the author’s PhD dissertation. But when nostalgia is so stretched as
a concept that it seems to explain everything,
including opposites, it explains nothing.
The deepest intellectual trap Woods and
Porter slide into is ‘exceptionalism’ – the
idea that Country A is different from every-
where else. Well-bred historians shun exceptionalism and, knowing that, our two authors
pay lip service to the orthodoxy. But both
need exceptionalism if their arguments are to
hold any water: we have to accept a range of
attitudes as uniquely or characteristically
British even though they are widely shared
transnationally.
Porter simply assumes that Britain is
uniquely obsessed with its past. Woods similarly assumes that Britain or England is
uniquely nostalgic. Neither tries to argue the
case. How could they? One does not need to
know much about other European countries
to realise that interest in and emotions about
the past are universal. Protestantism, Classicism, Romanticism, ruralism, the Gothic
Revival and so on are not in any meaningful sense British. Limiting oneself to British examples cannot disguise that obvious
fact. The European Union itself is founded
on obsessions with the past. But unless our
authors insist that Britain is the exception,
their explanations of Brexit make no sense.
For their proposition is that Brexit was
nostalgia: for empire and/or the second world war – hardly an original thought. As Wood
assures us, ‘many observers’ agree with this,
including Vince Cable, Afua Hirsch, David
Olusoga, Fintan O’Toole and various Americans. Some readers will be impressed. Like
most Remainer polemicists, Woods and
Porter have little if anything to say about
Europe or the EU. It’s easy to regard Britain
as exceptional if you ignore everywhere else.
In fact, British attitudes to the EU in 2016
were typically European: about the same
as Holland and Germany, less Eurosceptic
than France, much less so than Greece. The
‘exception’ is that the British were given
a vote and Remainers failed to reverse it.
Could it be that Brexit had something to
do with the problems of the EU rather than
the unique peculiarity of the British? The
European ‘project’ has been losing popular
support all across Europe since the 1990s.
Perhaps ‘nostalgia’ and ‘obsession with the
past’ have been breaking out in every country. Or perhaps more relevant are economic
failure, unemployment and unaccountability.
If we follow the historical approaches taken
in these two books, we shall never know.
This book review appears in the forthcoming Spectator, out tomorrow
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