Island Stories: Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit

On a larger canvas, Gibbon’s Rome has provided a template for telling the story of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last five centuries in terms of a great empire’s rise, decline and fall. This held a perennial, almost mesmeric fascination for a political class that modelled itself on imperial Rome. Under this narrative, however, lurk problematic notions of empire. Should it be understood as a clearly defined possession – eventually ‘lost’ or ‘surrendered’? Or was it like an increasingly outmoded and ill-fitting suit of clothes, which was finally tossed aside? This chapter looks more closely at Britain’s changing global role and at related shifts in the country’s power and prosperity – arguing that the Gibbonian concept of ‘decline’ is deeply misleading. In doing so, it also highlights a recurrent pattern of British political rhetoric from the late nineteenth century right up to the present. Politicians have frequently couched their campaigns to change national policy within a dramatic ‘declinist’ narrative of the recent past. Here are a few examples.[3]

Ideologists of ‘decline’

Joseph Chamberlain has been described by historian Peter Clarke as Britain’s ‘first leading politician to propose a drastic method of averting the sort of national decline’ that he ‘saw as otherwise inevitable’. Chamberlain was also the first to do so in a style of populist nationalism crafted for an era of mass politics. He and his followers posed a ‘Radical Right’ challenge to mainstream Toryism, preaching what has been called a gospel of ‘messianic catastrophism’.[4]

Chamberlain was a self-made Birmingham businessman who got rich as a manufacturer of screws, before moving into politics in the 1870s as a reforming Mayor of Birmingham (‘Radical Joe’) and then as a member of W. E. Gladstone’s second Liberal Cabinet. His ego and energy splintered not one but two parties – first the Liberals in 1886 because of his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, and then the Conservatives in 1903 over ‘Tariff Reform’. Quite what that phrase meant was almost as elusive as ‘Brexit’ in our own day, but at its core was Chamberlain’s conviction that the rise of competitors such as Germany and the United States must be met by abandoning the Victorian precepts of ‘free trade’ and imposing tariffs in order to protect British industry and to consolidate the empire. Only this strategy could save ‘the weary Titan’ who ‘staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.’ He told the colonials, ‘We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us.’ The alternative was decline into ‘a fifth-rate nation’ – another Venice or Holland. ‘All history is the history of states once powerful and then decaying,’ Chamberlain told a political rally in 1903. ‘Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying states: is all the glory of the past to be forgotten? … Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great empire, which will continue for generation after generation the strength, the power and the glory of the British race?’[5]

Chamberlain’s aim was to shore up Britain’s power base in an era of rival empires by protecting its existing manufacturing industries. For him, structural economic change was unacceptable: it would mean replacement by ‘secondary and inferior’ industries, causing ‘individual suffering’ to the working man without ‘any real compensation to the nation’. ‘Your once great trade in sugar refining is gone,’ he declaimed mockingly in another speech in 1903: ‘all right, try jam. Your iron trade is going; never mind, you can make mouse traps.’[6] But although Chamberlain’s populist crusade for tariff reform briefly caught the public imagination, it soon burnt out. The main effect was to divide the Conservatives and pave the way for the Liberal landslide of 1906. Chamberlain died, bitter and disillusioned, in July 1914 – a month before the Great War began. Ironically, during the 1920s and 1930s, the very restructuring and diversification he deplored would transform the Birmingham area. Chemicals and electrical engineering, aviation and motor vehicles not only rejuvenated the Midlands economy but also prepared Britain to wage a second world war in the era of airpower.[7]

Winston Churchill was another politician who, in later life, became obsessed with Britain’s decline – doing so, like Chamberlain, when in opposition and with one eye on gaining power. Conviction and calculation conjoined. After a spectacular political rise on either side of the Great War, culminating in Chancellorship of the Exchequer at the age of 50, the premiership seemed within Churchill’s grasp. But then, for a decade from 1929, he was cast out into the political wilderness, regarded as a wilful opportunist too mercurial for inclusion in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – Joe’s son. To attract attention he campaigned loudly on various causes, from Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis to air rearmament against Germany. It is the latter for which Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’ are now best remembered. But the underlying issue for him – and the one that sustained the rest of his life – was Britain’s decline as a great power.

Churchill’s crusade, however, took a very different form from Chamberlain’s. He was and remained a staunch Free Trader who had broken with the Tories over tariff reform. Churchill’s vision of Britain’s greatness centred not on the white-settler colonies that Chamberlain wanted to weld into an imperial economic bloc, but on India, which young Winston had experienced first-hand as a soldier fighting for his Queen Empress. In 1931 the Conservative party adopted a policy of giving India ‘dominion status’ within the British Empire – potentially setting it on a course of devolution and independence similar to that already conceded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Incensed, Churchill broke with the party leadership and embarked on a four-year crusade against what became the Government of India Act of 1935. Now virtually forgotten in British history, this was the biggest parliamentary struggle of the 1930s – eclipsing in time and passion even the issues of Germany and rearmament – for which Churchill rolled out some of his most extravagant rhetoric.

Inveighing in February 1931 against the ‘nauseating’ sight of ‘Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor,’ Churchill claimed that India was ‘no ordinary question of party politics’ but ‘one of those supreme issues which come upon us from time to time’, like going to war against Germany in 1914. A month later he warned that ‘the continuance of our present confusion and disintegration will reduce us within a generation, and perhaps sooner, to the degree of States like Holland and Portugal, which nursed valiant races, and held great possessions, but were stripped of them in the crush and competition of the world. That would be a melancholy end to all the old glories and recent triumphs.’[8] The root problem, in Churchill’s opinion, was a failure of national will since the Great War. ‘The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory. It is not that our strength is seriously impaired. We are suffering from a disease of the will. We are the victims of a nervous collapse, of a morbid state of the mind.’[9]

If willpower alone was what counted, Winston would have won the battle over India. But he led a diehard minority within the Tory party. What’s more, his vehemence and obduracy not only estranged him from the party leadership; it also undermined his credibility on more consequential matters. His description of the Indian nationalist leaders as ‘evil and malignant Brahmins’ with their ‘itching fingers stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire’ was striking, but it was ‘not likely to make comparable descriptions of genuinely evil men credible’.[10] Churchill’s hyperbole about India helped keep him in the political wilderness. Only with the onset of a second German war was he brought back into government.

Churchill never modified his opinions about India, empire and decline. Even in the darkest days of the Second World War in April 1942 – as Hitler’s Afrika Korps advanced on Cairo and the Japanese conquered Burma – he deplored any concessions to Indian nationalists. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt breezily informed Prime Minister Churchill that the British should concede self-government to India, on the lines of the Articles of Confederation under which the new United States had initially been run after independence in 1783, Churchill replied that he ‘could not be responsible’ for such a policy and even threatened to make it a resignation issue.[11] In November 1942 he warned defiantly: ‘We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’[12]

On this, Churchill proved as good as his word. But not because liquidation did not happen; only that he did not have to preside over it. For that lucky escape, he had the British electorate to thank: they voted him out of office in July 1945. What one might call his ‘second wilderness years’, from 1945 to 1951, allowed him to watch from the sidelines and criticise with impunity Clement Attlee’s Labour Government for its ‘scuttle’ from India and Burma in 1947. Some of his predictions had prescience – for instance that ‘any attempt to establish the reign of a Hindu numerical majority in India will never be achieved without a civil war’ – but, as in the 1930s, they were blunted by his jeremiad of decline and his lamentations about lack of will. ‘It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories, and all the services it has rendered to mankind. I am sure that in the hour of our victory now not so long ago, we had the power to make a solution of our difficulties which would have been honourable and lasting. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.’[13]

In similar vein, campaigning for the premiership again in October 1951, Churchill denounced Attlee’s six years as marking ‘the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world’ since ‘the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago.’ He asserted that ‘our Oriental Empire has been liquidated’ and ‘our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.’[14] Back in office, however, the ailing Churchill did not fight the tide. He saw little choice but to approve the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone in 1954, arousing the anger of a new generation of Tory diehards, which opened the door to Egypt’s nationalisation of the Canal two years later.

Although Tories have been particularly prone to narratives of decline, something of the sort also underpinned Labour’s election victory of 1945. The party’s manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’ was rooted in a historical narrative of lost greatness – this time not about empire, but about social promise betrayed by wilful politics.[15] ‘So far as Britain’s contribution is concerned’, the manifesto argued, ‘this war will have been won by its people, not by any one man.’ (The Tory campaign featured Churchill.) The Great War had similarly been a people’s victory, Labour went on, but afterwards the people had allowed ‘the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’ (Stanley Baldwin’s famous phrase) to craft ‘the kind of peace that suited themselves’. And so, despite winning the war, ‘the people lost that peace.’ By which Labour meant not only the Treaty of Versailles, but also ‘the social and economic policy which followed the fighting’.

In the years after 1918, those ‘hard-faced men’ and their political allies kept control of the government, and also the banks, mines, big industries, most of the press and the cinema. This, said Labour’s manifesto, happened in all the big industrialised countries. So, ‘The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.’ They acted solely in the interest of their own private monopolies ‘which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.’

Similar forces were at work now in 1945, the manifesto warned. ‘The problems and pressure of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace.’ On election morning, 5 July, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror told readers: ‘Vote on behalf of the men who won the victory for you. You failed to do so in 1918. The result is known to all.’ The paper devoted most of its front page to reprinting a Zec cartoon first published on VE Day in May. This showed a weary, battered soldier holding out a laurel wreath labelled ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’. The caption read: ‘Here You Are – Don’t Lose it Again.’[16]

This narrative of the lost peace, torn from the hands of the people by greedy capitalists, was sharpened by bitter memories of mass unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Together they informed Labour’s campaign of nationalisation after its triumph in 1945. The flagship policies of bringing the commanding heights of the economy – industries such as coal, steel, utilities and railways – into public ownership and providing a stronger social safety net through the welfare state and the National Health Service were presented as repayment to the people for their sacrificial efforts during two world wars in a quarter of a century.

Once built, however, Labour’s edifice became a central target of the declinist narrative of another Tory three decades later: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She outlined her stark version of history in the introduction to her memoirs, The Downing Street Years: ‘Britain in 1979 was a nation that had had the stuffing knocked out of it’ over the course of the previous century. In economic terms, Thatcher acknowledged that some degree of relative decline was inevitable, once rivals such as America and Germany caught up with Britain’s head start. But, she argued, the country had ‘failed to respond to the challenge effectively. We invested less; we educated and trained our people to a lower standard; and we allowed our workers and manufacturers to combine in various cartels that restricted competition and reduced efficiency.’ Most serious of all, after 1945 the country had indulged in a protracted and disastrous experiment with socialism. This ‘represented a centralising, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government’, which ‘jammed a finger in every pie’ on the principle that ‘the gentleman in Whitehall really know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves.’[17]

Breaking the hold of Labour statism was not merely a domestic priority. Thatcher argued that ‘Britain’s weakened economic position meant that its international role was bound to be cramped and strained as well.’ She cited the failure of the Suez expedition of 1956 as a turning point – in her opinion a military victory undermined by ‘political and economic weakness’ because Anthony Eden’s government withdrew the troops that had regained the Canal after a run on the pound encouraged by Washington. ‘Whatever the details’, she continued briskly (and evasively), this defeat ‘entered the British soul and distorted our perspective on Britain’s place in the world.’ Thanks to the ‘Suez syndrome’, as she called it, ‘having previously exaggerated our power, we now exaggerated our impotence.’[18]

Her account of history was not just retrospective wisdom. Reversing decline was almost the leitmotif of Thatcher’s politics. ‘Britain’s prestige in the eyes of the world has gone down and down,’ she had declared during her very first election campaign in 1950, when she was 24: ‘We Conservatives are not afraid to face the future whatever problem it entails, because it is our earnest desire to make Great Britain great again.’[19] Such rhetoric was certainly at the heart of her message in the 1979 campaign. ‘I can’t bear Britain in decline. I just can’t,’ she exclaimed to a BBC interviewer. ‘We who either defeated or rescued half Europe, who kept half Europe free, when otherwise it would be in chains. And look at us now!’[20] She told an audience in Bolton: ‘Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mists of time, like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.’[21] This was her refrain right to the end. ‘Let me give you my vision,’ she declaimed in her final election broadcast. ‘Somewhere ahead lies greatness for our country again; this I know in my heart.’[22]

Thatcher shared with Joseph Chamberlain and Churchill a Napoleonic belief in the capacity of a great leader to transform history through sheer willpower. Indeed, in her memoirs she applied to herself the famous words of William Pitt the Elder, during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63: ‘I know that I can save the country and that no one else can.’[23] And she employed her formidable will and conviction to cover inner insecurities and get her way in an overwhelmingly male world. Not only did she seem happiest when ‘up against a wall’, biographer Hugo Young observed. But ‘when she wasn’t actually embattled, she needed to imagine or invent the condition: embattled against the cabinet, against Whitehall, against the country, against the world’.[24]

After Margaret Thatcher’s victory in the Falklands War, Cummings in the Daily Express (16 June 1982) shows her waving the Union Jack in triumph while white-flag merchants from the Foreign Office and the Labour party – Tony Benn (middle) and party leader Michael Foot (right) – lie flat on their backs.

Indeed one can say that her grand narrative of those Downing Street years was constructed around two triumphant battles royal against ‘decline’: the Falklands War in the spring of 1982 and the miners’ strike of 1984–5. Argentina’s shock capture of the Falkland Islands, which it claimed as the Malvinas, provoked a cross-party wave of anger in Parliament on 3 April, but Thatcher made the operation to liberate the 1,800 British islanders from Argentine rule into her own personal crusade. And she used the eventual victory over General Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta to make a larger point. ‘When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts,’ she told a Tory rally in Cheltenham on 3 July 1982. ‘Those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were.’ But now, she proclaimed, ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat … Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’[25] Or more pithily, to a jubilant crowd singing ‘Rule Britannia’ outside 10 Downing Street: ‘Great Britain is great again.’[26] Almost as if the mission she had set herself in 1950 had now been accomplished.

In June 1983 the ‘Falklands Factor’ helped her to win a landslide election victory and in 1984–5 she was ready to take on Arthur Scargill and the striking miners in their last-ditch effort – under the slogan ‘jobs, pits and communities’ – to stop what was effectively the closure of their industry. For Thatcher, however, the miners became the centrepiece of her struggle to break up the unprofitable and bureaucratic state monopolies and she treated Scargill as the domestic equivalent of General Galtieri. Notes for a speech to Tory backbenchers in July 1984 read:

Since Office

Enemy without – beaten him

& strong in defence

Enemy within –

Miners’ leaders …

– just as dangerous

Biographer Charles Moore writes that Downing Street staff prepared for the miners’ strike as if it were another war. ‘Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. And once she had vanquished Scargill just like Galtieri, Thatcher won the election of 1987 on the slogan: ‘Britain is Great Again. Don’t Let Labour Wreck It.’[27]

Yet there were limits to Britain’s ‘greatness’. Margaret Thatcher was also the Prime Minister who, having liberated 1,800 British subjects from the Argentine junta, in December 1984 signed over 5.5 million other British subjects in Hong Kong to the rule of China – a communist state to boot. Like Churchill over the Canal Zone, she saw no choice given the realities of power. Under the ‘one nation, two systems’ principle enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, British sovereignty would end in 1997 but Hong Kong was to be a ‘Special Administrative Region’ enjoying ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for another fifty years, with its social and economic system ‘unchanged’ and civil and property rights ‘protected by law’. Even before the handover in 1997, however, these guarantees were called into question by the Chinese government’s brutal repression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. And nothing the British government said or did could influence Beijing.

The rhetoric of reversing ‘decline’ by the assertion of willpower has also been at the heart of the Brexit narrative. Take, for instance, the speech delivered by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading Brexiter, who took pride in his nickname ‘the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’.[28] That, he claimed, was the century in which ‘the seeds of our greatness, sown long before in our distinguished history, sown conceivably by Alfred the Great, began to grow and to flourish in a way that led to our extended period of good fortune and greatness.’ But Rees-Mogg said that he also wanted to be the ‘Honourable Member for the Twenty-First Century’ because this was the century in which the country would ‘regain its independence’ and ‘rediscover the opportunities of a truly global Britain’.

‘How we came to join the European Union is an important part of understanding our Island story,’ Rees-Mogg explained. ‘We won the war and were full of optimism about our place in the World, but then came Suez.’ In his opinion, the debacle of 1956 had a profound and debilitating effect, permanently undermining the nation’s self-confidence. ‘Margaret Thatcher tried to break away from that, but it was such a strong feeling that once she had gone it seeped back again.’ As a result of Suez, ‘the Nation’s view of itself changed and the Establishment, the Elite, decided that its job was to manage decline, that the best they could do was to soften the blow of descending downwards, soften the effect on the Nation of being less successful than it had been in the past, and recognise that we would not be able to keep up with other countries. This led to the notion that it was Europe or bust.’ But that, he argued, was a false contrast because Britain had ended up with both: in Europe and also bust. The country made the mistake of joining flagging, low-growth economies so that the process of ‘managing our decline’ became ‘part of managing the decline of the whole of the European Union by putting a fortress around it’.

So, he asserted, the 2016 referendum was a vote ‘by people who believed in democracy’ and ‘voted to take back control’. And any attempt by those he derided as ‘cave-dwellers’ to keep Britain in the EU – in fact if not name – ‘would be Suez all over again. It would be the most almighty smash to the national psyche that could be imagined … an admission of abject failure … that we were not fit, that we were too craven, that we were too weak to be able to govern ourselves … Although countries across the Globe can govern themselves, poor little Blighty cannot.’ But if, on the other hand, Britain embraced Brexit wholeheartedly, there was ‘a world of opportunity ahead of us’ as we took ‘charge of our own destiny protected by our own laws’ and ‘setting our own direction’ in international affairs rather than ‘hiding behind the skirts of the German Chancellor’.