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Vaccine war is Johnson’s chance to rewrite the Brexit narrative

Even major historical events are judged on their outcomes, not on details or processes

There is a joke circulating on social media right now: "Anyone else tired of living through a major historical event?" Even without the pandemic it feels like a fitting statement for the past year, with the Black Lives Matter movement exploding over the summer; rioters storming the Capitol in Washington, goaded by a sitting president; and Brexit exposing the fragility of the union.

It raises the question of how these major events will be remembered by history, if they are remembered at all? Have we, by virtue of living through something, overburdened it with historical significance?

At the end of his book on Britain’s relationship with Europe, This Sovereign Isle, Robert Tombs posits that future generations will wonder why we “got so worked up about Brexit”. Most of us don’t remember the precise details of the Home Rule question, or the tariff reforms of the 1900s, or the free-trade arguments of the 1840s, he argues.

It is an interesting theory. After the referendum – which crassly polarised the nation into Remainers and Leavers – Brexit swiftly moved on from these identity debates and onto technical conversations about free-trade agreements, the single market, tariffs and food standards. It is hardly gripping stuff for the vast majority of us, so it follows that it won’t make a significant mark on our collective historical memory.

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Consequences

As an argument it is only sort of right. It is true that people don’t recall arcane details of parliamentary disputes, but we do absorb and live through their consequences. We may be muddy on the nature of the tariff reforms and free-trade debates, but now we experience the consequences of a Tory party today that is still an uneasy coalition of protectionists and free marketeers.

What determines something’s historical significance is not the detail nor its process but its outcomes. When it comes to Brexit we are long way off understanding what those outcomes will be: Boris Johnson’s last-minute trade deal is so scant we are still in the dark over many aspects of the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU; the future of the union is foggy as debates about Scottish independence and Irish reunification slowly unfold; and parliament is facing years of conversations about the kind of global trading partner it intends to be. With all of these factors up in the air it seems rather premature to consign Brexit to a historical footnote.

It is not just about outcomes, however, but how we tell the stories of these big moments. Tom McTague wonders in the Atlantic how Britain’s pandemic performance will be assessed. As the nation passes the tragic milestone of 100,000 deaths it is also excelling over its European neighbours in vaccine delivery. The battle over what assessment will win out will not be between “political archaeologists” but between “storytellers fighting to define the national myth of what happened”. And if Johnson plays his cards right, the lore of Britain’s pandemic may be defined by its ending – its vaccination programme – not the bulk of its otherwise consistent failures.

Irish tragedy

Ireland is facing the inverse. If we accept the memory of an event is defined by its conclusion and consequences, then Ireland’s pandemic performance – fairly or unfairly – may not be treated kindly by history at all. The initial successes, thanks to decisive action and stringent restrictions (at least more stringent than the UK), were the defining qualities of the first stages of the crisis on the island. But the move from having the lowest incidence in Europe at the end of November 2020 to one of the highest in the world by January 2021 will stick in the minds of observers. The positive qualities of Ireland’s early response will be eclipsed by the tragedy of its position by January. And with the vaccine rollout functioning, but at a much slower rate than its closest neighbour, it seems it will be a hard narrative to shake.

Of course you want to tell a story that emphasises your strengths rather than one that dwells on your failures. But the ability to do that depends in no small part on how you emerge from a crisis. We may say that Ireland exhibited forethought at the beginning of the Covid crisis, but what will emerge is a story about its fall from grace and the impacts that has on national recovery.

And though Brexit is a question staggeringly different in scale and quality to the pandemic, it will still have significant consequences. How that narrative forms will depend on how severe or moderate those consequences are. The processes of Brexit may not be much remembered at all, but what will be remembered are the reverberations it has on the Conservative Party for years to come; the impacts it has on business owners; what it means for the future of the union; and the long-lasting impacts it has on British national identity.

But amid debates about how we judge the historical significance of something we are currently living through is the crucial but easily forgotten argument: how something is understood in 100 years’ time matters little to people experiencing it now. Whether Brexit is a footnote of history has little bearing on fishermen who have lost their business, or those in Border communities facing consistent upheaval. And a swift vaccine rollout does not alter the tragedy of the more than 100,000 lives already lost to the pandemic.