Historical nonsense underpins UK’s Brexit floundering
From Hastings to Dunkirk a past that blinds Britain to reality has been peddled
Tory MP Michael Fabricant expressed the hope that prime minister Theresa May becomes “the new Boudica”. Image: iStock
In June, the UK’s then Brexit secretary, David Davis, said: “Anyone who suggests that the United Kingdom cannot be trusted, and isn’t the proven friend of every single country in Europe, needs to brush up on their history.” Like former UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson in a Burmese temple, one cannot help but think of the words of Rudyard Kipling. “They are whimpering to and fro,” he lamented in his 1891 poem The English Flag, “what should they know of England who only England know?” Very little, it appears, as the pied pipers of Brexit have peddled a past that blinds Britain to reality. Politicians, public, and press need remedial history lessons before it’s too late.
The Brexiteers’ historical narrative begins by mangling the medieval. “The first Eurosceptic,” according to Tory Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, was the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great, who defeated the Norse ‘great heathen army’ in 865. Rees-Mogg likens the European Union to the Vikings, opposing a financial settlement with Brussels by quoting Kipling’s warning: “If once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.”