Time warp

How we love bringing history into our political debates. It may seem strange in a country where so little history is taught at school, but perhaps that makes it easier. We grab hold of vague notions of the past for a Punch-and-Judy brawl. There could hardly be a better example of this than Brexit, in which we skim through the whole of our history to search for analogies to batter the other side with. The Roman empire, the Norman conquest, the Wars of the Roses, the British Empire, appeasement, the second world war, Suez…

Leavers have fulminated against ‘traitors’ who deserve the Tower for flouting Henry VIII’s assertion of sovereignty. Remainers have accused Leavers of being racists, imperialists, indeed, worse than Nazis. On a brighter note, Iain Duncan Smith’s recent comparison of Brexit to the Reformation talked of its ushering in a golden age when Britain ‘led the globe’. Professor Simon Schama, denouncing ‘dunces’ who use history to illustrate simplistic ideas, points out the Reformation was a European phenomenon that produced a long period of religious mayhem.

What much of this pseudo-historical polemic has in common (apart from a desire to annoy the other side) is that it tries to create a sense of inevitability and drama. Rather than Brexit being a proper subject of rational argument and democratic choice, it is presented, especially by hard-line Remainers, as being outside the proper ambit of the electorate. Because we are and always have been ‘European’, we must remain in the EU. One could hardly come up with a more simplistic idea than that.