Dreams of empire, blitz spirit, a country in decline … this crisp and concise book shows that competing visions of the past are driving the Brexit project
For diehard Brexiters, the most potent image of their project is the “clean break”. It is in itself a rather attractive notion, especially in our culture of personal make-overs and radical transformations. Brexit is the New You. It proposes a Year Zero and an Independence Day – points of origin at which a whole other story of British greatness begins. Like most revolutions, it imagines a sloughing off of history, especially, of course, the history of half a century of deep entanglement with the European Union. It offers a free programme of collective rehab, a political version of the Scientologists’ goal of “going clear”.
Yet one of the many incoherences of the Brexit project is that it cannot sustain even this rhetoric of a magical escape from the past. It proposes a giant leap into a glorious future but, as the Anglo-Irish philosopher Johnny Rotten snarled more than 40 years ago, “there is no future in England’s dreaming”. What is to follow from the great rupture has always been fuzzy. There is, instead, an awful lot of past.
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