GUEST POST/The Empire strikes back

This guest post has been written by Victor Pace.

In 1953, the English football team played Hungary at Wembley Stadium. They had no doubt they would teach Johnny Foreigner a thing or two about football – they had invented the game after all.

“Look at that fat little chap”, one of the English players is reported to have said just before kick-off. He was talking about Ferenc Puskas, the Hungarian star player. By 28 minutes, England was 1-4 down. They lost 3-6, Puskas scoring twice, and it was a massive shock for the nation.

Six months later they had a rematch, in Hungary – and lost 7-1. It rocked British football. Alf Ramsey played in that match, and the lessons he learned helped him modernise English football and win the 1966 World Cup as England manager.

But winning that World Cup was bad for English football. Once more they were convinced of their superiority. Even now, 50 years later, they still endearingly go into every football tournament convinced they have a really good chance of winning this time. They rarely make it through the quarter finals.

This unshakeable sense of superiority, rarely amenable to reality testing, is a large factor in explaining the result of the British referendum. Certainly there were other powerful reasons, which have been well rehearsed.

A political class both in Britain and in Europe which has shown itself utterly incapable of true leadership. The rise of a fascistic populism throughout the democratic world in the face of general political alienation. A staggeringly inept Remain campaign based on scare tactics, which never responded when the Leave side simply scoffed at all the experts Remain produced, and never tackled the immigration issue head on.

They missed the point that the Leave campaign thrived on anti-politics, and so the Remain campaign was political through and through, playing right into the hands of their opponents.

But the carefully nourished mythology of national superiority played a large part in making people believe all the experts were wrong. They are the British people, and Britain is greater alone. The sentiment was summed up in the words of one woman interviewed by Sky News in Harlow Town after the vote: “We’re British. We don’t want all those other people.”

It all started with Henry VIII and the break with Rome, and then, far more, with Elizabeth I, who built a strong nationalistic narrative around the defeat of the Spanish Armada – much of which was destroyed by tempests at sea, not in the battle which some historians believe the Spanish actually won. But Elizabeth managed to unite a nation and give it an identity as a plucky little fighter against all odds.

Union with Scotland under one (Scottish) king, a beheaded king, a civil war, the Glorious Revolution of the Prince of Orange. And then enter George I, the Hanoverian prince who, being a foreign import and wanting to gain legitimacy with his new people against Catholic Stuart claimants, played the Protestant card, identifying Britishness ever more with the fight against popery, and hence much of Europe, which was papist.

Then of course came the British Empire. You cannot rule over others unless you know you are their superior, and how else do you ward off claims from competing European powers other than by telling your people they are far better, in their blood, than all those suspect continentals?

The Dutch, the French, Napoleon, the Russians, the Germans – all were fought, most were vanquished. The whole education system was geared to the maintenance of Empire: harsh public schools training young men to be district commissioners in faraway outposts – little dictators, isolated, but secure in the rightness of their cause and the uniqueness of their culture. They led a nation of stiff upper lips, because you cannot impose yourself over others if you allow yourself to become emotional. You need to be unshakably firm of purpose.

The myth was strengthened in the Second World War when Britain stood alone (apart, of course, from a little Empire on which the sun never set). Many British people still believe Britain won the war, but of course the Russians beat the Germans and the Americans beat the Japanese.

One cannot deny the enormous contribution played by Britain, of course; Britain may not have won the war, but it may well have been lost without its unyielding resistance in the first couple of years. But in Britain, the contributions of other countries are often played down. Plucky England, who alone held out against Germany when all of Europe fell, gave the British an abiding sense that they are made of stronger moral fibre than any of their neighbours.

Churchill intelligently exploited this sense to bind his people together in resistance. Geographical isolation as an island, the backing of a massive Empire and a very large navy, and key German miscalculations at critical times (not finishing off the British Army at Dunkirk, pulling back when the Battle of Britain was almost won, invading Russia at just the wrong time) played as big a part, but these factors are rarely emphasised, just as the myth that enabled the Empire to flourish has never been allowed to die down. It is a dog whistle to which practically all English people over a certain age, and younger ones of little to no education, respond and implicitly believe.

It does not matter that British cancer survival rates are almost the worst in the European Union, or that British industrial productivity lags far behind France’s and Germany’s, whose workers enjoy more rights, or that inequality is higher in Britain than in almost all of Europe. Britain is clearly superior to the rest of Europe, which is seen as corrupt through and through, especially in the South, and inept and over-bureaucratic. Which it probably is. One of the reasons the Remain campaign lost was that it played to these sentiments instead of confronting them.

The Leave camp reserves a special hatred for the European Convention of Human Rights (nothing to do with the EU, but what’s a minor detail like that among friends?). They want Britain to opt out of it, as does Theresa May, the Home Secretary. How dare these Europeans impose their foreign human rights on Britain, as if we can’t pass our own laws? The Remain camp’s reply was that the ECHR was mostly drafted by a British man, a Scotsman, really – Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, former prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, who nailed Goering when he very nearly wriggled out of being found guilty. But if the ECHR is bad, then it is bad whoever drafted it, and if it is good, it will be as good whatever its origin. It is the content which matters, not authorship.

Again, the main argument used by Remain was that Britain could teach a thing or two to those Europeans, reform Europe in its own, unquestionably superior, mould. Speaker after speaker emphasised this. I have never heard anyone say what Britain could learn from other European countries. That spirit was cultivated by Thatcher, and by Cameron – thankfully Major and Blair were different.

For internal party reasons, Cameron was forever going to Europe to scold the Europeans, to tell them how it should be done. So the British always heard the same mantra: we are superior, they need us, we do not need them. And then, shock horror, in the referendum they acted as if they believed just that. Whatever next. Of course they did.

There is of course a lot of truth in bits of the English (much more than British) narrative. Britain does have a lot to offer an often over-fussy Europe. It is a country which has made a greater success than most of integrating people from many backgrounds – well, at least London has, which reflects on the referendum result. It is a country which punches well above its weight in science, in technology, in original ideas. And most English people are deeply decent and tolerant. And of course 48% voted to Remain.

But in the end, the mythology they created to build and sustain an Empire has let them down. If one good thing comes out of this referendum, it may be that this sense of the world needing Britain but Britain not needing the world might suffer some serious, perhaps even lasting, damage.

The Leave campaign was largely fronted by “toffs” who learned this vision of England which sustains their social class. The English are peculiarly susceptible to accepting an order from above to view the world in a certain way, and that I believe has deep roots in the class system. The Reformation, the deferential attitude of soldiers in the First World War – even now, you will see it in the way the Prime Minister pronounces an argument they cannot win closed, and people oblige.

This is all very foreign to Southern European ears, used to contesting and protesting. In this referendum, the toffs said to the working class that all their troubles stemmed from Europe, not from austerity, not from the growing gulf between rich and poor – and the working classes obligingly voted to leave, like turkeys voting for Christmas.

Britain is undoubtedly a great nation, which has given the world much that is of value, from the type of parliamentary democracy we know to a non-political civil service, and television, and fish and chips. It just needs to understand that many others have bits of greatness too, and everyone is best served by mutual respect and cooperation. The myth-making has come back to bite the British, and it has bitten them where it can hurt them very, very much.