Brexit is about Empire? Don’t be daft

Western politics is haunted by spectres of twentieth-century catastrophe. In America, the election of Donald Trump is often seen by his critics as an echo of the rise of pre-war Fascism in Europe. Corbynism is a cipher for 1970s-style stagnation. Brexit is given the same treatment and presented as a post-colonial identity crisis of the kind famously identified by Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State. Out of office, Acheson remarked in 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role”.

That rather neat sixties aphorism has mutated into a widely-heard explanation for the Brexit vote in 2016. As in Sussex University academic Gurminder Bhambra’s assertion: “What we are currently witnessing with Brexit is what the end of empire looks like.” And Gary Younge, writing in The Guardian, sees parallels between buccaneering Brexiteers like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage and the over-confidence that led to the 1956 Suez crisis: “Preferring to live in the past rather than learn from it, we find ourselves diminished in the present and clueless about the future.”

But the idea that Brexit is about a desire to return to empire is daft. The British Empire really is gone, and Brexit is not Suez – a crisis borne of elite conspiracy in the corridors of power. Sometimes the past really is another country. Brexit is a crisis, to be sure, but of a different kind. Some 17.4 million Britons voted for it, but our parliamentary system (not to mention the Civil Service) is struggling to contain and deliver on what it expressed.

Younge is right in one respect. The past is important. But we should not rely on history to give us easy answers to complex problems. The superficially compelling notion at the heart of Brexit – “take back control” – can quite easily be read as nostalgic will-to-power sloganeering. But that doesn’t explain its almost magical appeal.

It is difficult to encourage genuine nostalgia (a synthesis of the Greek νόστος = homecoming, with Ἄλγος = pain), because it is difficult to see what we would be returning to. Believe it or not, but the experience of Empire in the UK was basically marginal to early twentieth-century politics. The Boer War never quite caught the popular imagination in the same way as “the wars of survival” (the First and Second World Wars). Although the effects of Empire were certainly not marginal to the experience of its subject peoples (many of whom fought and died in the World Wars), mass jingoism for a British Empire in step with a British World was rare, and predominantly a product of the collective imagination of the Public Schools.

Britain is made up four nations, and they all played very different roles in the functioning of Empire. Scotland voted Remain, and by a wide margin, but it was Scotland’s energy, manpower and tenacity that played a disproportionately large role in the actual functioning of empire – through business, trade and officialdom. Much of the modern world is built on Scottish capital, enterprise and knowhow (it’s a shame so little of it made it back north of the border).

Let’s rewind to the notion that Brexit is best seen as a popular challenge to representative democracy. That’s illustrated by the confusion that traditional parties face as they try to figure out the best of way of absorbing the 2016 vote, cutting as it did across Labour and Conservative lines.

If there is nostalgia in that expression of dissatisfaction with our representatives, it perhaps expresses a longing for a period in which representative democracy worked pretty well. In the immediate post-war period, the threat of extinction brought by the Second World War gave life, in its aftermath, to a genuine democratic ethos expressed in mass membership of political parties, broad distribution of state resources, and a renewed sense of post-imperial patriotism.

It was also a period in which representative democracy – with its vast extensions of the franchise to women and working men – began finally to deliver on its promise, accompanied by the kind of collective benefits (the NHS, social security, better childcare, funding for the arts) that improved personal dignity and national confidence.

Incidentally, it was also a time in which the Empire was in sharp retreat. There was little popular appetite for maintaining control of our former colonies, such as Kenya or Burma.

So yes, history can teach us some things – but “Brexit-is-really-about-Empire” isn’t one of them.