Brexit and British Myths

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

With the wheels coming off the Brexit negotiations between the United Kingdom and the European Union, we might look back at some of the political myths that have sustained the British people over the years.

Britain is now facing what many call a “hard” Brexit. In other words, a departure from the EU on May 22 with no guarantees whatever about post-departure trade, commerce, financial and immigration arrangements. 

Great Britain would again be standing in “splendid isolation” from the continent as it did for many centuries.

The debate is not just an argument about leaving the European Union but a broader dispute about the kind of country Britain wishes to be.

Brexit is bound up with the idea of “Britishness,” that often nebulous shared culture that has become part of the debate.

The country has many myths to draw upon. How often in history is the myth of Agincourt appealed to -- the story of how “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” in Shakespeare’s rendering, overcame great odds to win a glorious victory over the French in 1415. 

In the midst of the Second World War, Shakespeare’s phrase was used to striking effect by Winston Churchill.

There are many others. There is the Magna Carta; Robin Hood and his Merry Men; the Reformation as freedom from Rome; the heroic defeat of the Spanish Armada under the rule of Elizabeth I; the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688; the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo leading to the defeat of Napoleon; Dunkirk, the Blitz and the eventual demise of Hitler.

There is the idea of an “island race,” and of the country as a fortress, “a precious stone set in a silver sea.”

But do these stories still have purchase? After all, the loss of the empire, the devolution process granting self-government to Scotland and Wales,, and participation in the EU has stripped the nation of its major identity myths. 

While the loss of traditions and symbolic landmarks that used to act as collective glue is lamented by the elderly, for younger people, they seem dated and anachronistic, of little relevance today. 

For 46 years, Britain has endured an uneasy relationship with the continent. Membership in a German-dominated EU ​reflected Britain’s reduced status.

Still, it was hoped that Europe would suffice as a replacement for the long-gone empire. ​It was the answer to Dean Acheson’s quip that, having lost that empire, Britain was in desperate need of finding a new role in the world.

In 1962, Acheson, a former United States Secretary of State, told a conference at West Point Military Academy that Britain's role as an independent power was over.

“Britain's attempt to play a separate power role - that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being the head of a Commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship -- this role is about played out.”

But “Taking back control,” the slogan coined by the leave campaign, has proved more complicated than expected. Yet leaving this “Eurocracy” may be necessary.

Britain’s prosperity, long-term, depends upon its character, Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Centre in Washington, contends.

Freed from the EU’s rules and Franco-German domination, British character, he suggests in a Washington Post commentary written last December, will create new opportunities.

Tony Abbott, prime minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015, agrees. “I would say this: Britain has nothing to lose except the shackles that the EU imposes on it,” he wrote in the British periodical the Spectator last November.

“The country that did the most to bring democracy into the modern world might yet throw away the chance to take charge of its own destiny.

“After the courage shown by its citizens in the referendum, it would be a tragedy if political leaders go wobbly now. Britain’s future has always been global, rather than just with Europe.”

The EU is effectively an empire headquartered in Brussels run by globalists, so it’s no surprise it is making it as hard as possible for a province to secede. The EU’s palpable desire to punish Britain for leaving vindicates the Brexit project.

But if Britain fails to leave, the citizens who voted for Brexit in June of 2016 will feel angry, cheated, and disenfranchised.