The debate on Britain\u2019s departure from the European Union, before the referendum and ever since, has invoked the past: \u2018Our Island Story\u2019 and a thousand years of history. The Leavers, or Brexiteers, are especially prone to talking of \u2018vassalage\u2019 and medieval history, of the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, of the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), and of 1940, when the British stood alone. A powerful, palpable sense of nostalgia pervades the whole enterprise.<\/p>\n
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, a frequent contributor to the New York Times <\/em>and the New York Review of Books <\/em>as well as to newspapers and magazines in Britain. His books include The Randlords <\/em>(1985), The Controversy of Zion <\/em>(1996), andYo, Blair! <\/em>(2007). He has been a regular visitor to the British Studies Seminar, talking more than once about Winston Churchill, a book on whose reputation and legacy he is finishing. Since being taken to a football game in Austin, he has considered himself a long-range Longhorn fan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Geoffrey Wheatcroft The debate on Britain\u2019s departure from the European Union, before the referendum and ever since, has invoked the past: \u2018Our Island Story\u2019 and a thousand years of history. The Leavers, or Brexiteers, are especially prone to talking of \u2018vassalage\u2019 and medieval history, of the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, of the […]","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/04\/04-26-19-BSLS_2.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"70.3M","filesize_raw":"73717760","date_recorded":"26-04-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[152,119,153,154,40,151,155,120,156,157],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-148","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-atx","6":"tag-austin","7":"tag-brexit","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","10":"tag-geoffrey-wheatcroft","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-university-of-texas","13":"tag-us","14":"tag-winston-churchill","15":"series-bsls","16":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":868,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-24 16:51:21","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:51:21","post_content":"\n Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, a frequent contributor to the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>and the\u00a0New York Review of Books\u00a0<\/em>as well as to newspapers and magazines in Britain. His books include\u00a0The Randlords\u00a0<\/em>(1985),\u00a0The Controversy of Zion\u00a0<\/em>(1996), andYo, Blair!\u00a0<\/em>(2007). He has been a regular visitor to the British Studies Seminar, talking more than once about Winston Churchill, a book on whose reputation and legacy he is finishing. Since being taken to a football game in Austin, he has considered himself a long-range Longhorn fan.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Geoffrey Wheatcroft","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"geoffrey-wheatcroft","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-24 16:51:21","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-24 16:51:21","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=868","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" I still have a couple of minutes. Students have a<\/p>\n habit of coming in just the last moment. Some elders want to wait just a minute or so more.<\/p>\n Well, that’s the first time I think that we’re actually beginning early, such as the expectation<\/p>\n of everyone looking forward to hearing Geoffrey Wheatcroft, who is a very<\/p>\n stalwart of British studies. We’re always glad to have him back. And<\/p>\n today he will be talking about Brexit and its historical<\/p>\n perspective. Now, Geoffrey, as I think everyone knows, is a frequent contributor<\/p>\n to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The London<\/p>\n Review of Books, The New Republic. One could go on and on. He<\/p>\n is also the author of several important books, The Rant Lords<\/p>\n The Controversy of Zion, which won the National Jewish Book Award<\/p>\n and the Strange Death of Terry England. Perhaps a little bit<\/p>\n premature because the Brexit has a heavy Tory component<\/p>\n to it, or so it seems to me. He is also. It was one time the<\/p>\n literary editor of The Spectator s,<\/p>\n as well as writing for the tearless, The New York Review of Books and so on. And so,<\/p>\n Geoffrey, we very much look forward to hearing your interpretation of the historical romance<\/p>\n as a component of Brexit. Geoffrey Flitcroft,<\/p>\n thank you very much indeed, Roger. And good day, ladies and gentlemen, as ever.<\/p>\n It is a very great pleasure to be back in Austin,<\/p>\n where I have made so many happy visits in the past. I didn’t think it<\/p>\n was going to be able to deconstruct easily the particular Anglo<\/p>\n American statement I’m making today. But those of the braces or suspenders<\/p>\n of they’re not marriageable in cricket Club of Lords. The headquarters of cricket<\/p>\n there is my Longhorns pin.<\/p>\n In 1962, the United Kingdom made its first application to join the European<\/p>\n Economic Community, or Common Market, as everyone then called it. One English politician<\/p>\n just so decided to oppose this bid. And that October, he did so in a rousing<\/p>\n speech which conjured up memories of the Great War battles at Gallipoli in V.me Ridge.<\/p>\n More than that, to join the EEC would mean the end of Britain as an independent<\/p>\n European state. He said I make no apology for repeating it. It<\/p>\n means the end of a thousand years of history. There were echoes<\/p>\n there of earlier phrases, some happier than others. In 1948, Winston<\/p>\n Churchill had famously told the British to brace ourselves to our duties, and<\/p>\n so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its commonwealths last<\/p>\n for a thousand years, men will still say this was the finest hour.<\/p>\n But then he was facing an antagonist who had spoken of the thousand thousand-year. Right?<\/p>\n And yet there was nothing more striking about those particular thousand years of<\/p>\n history. For a long time now, since well before the referendum<\/p>\n in June 2016, in which a majority of the British people voted to leave what is now the European<\/p>\n Union and much more since then, those who call themselves<\/p>\n euro skeptics, but who might more accurately pooled Europhobes,<\/p>\n mostly right wing conservatives, passionately in favor of what<\/p>\n we’ve come to called Brexit or British departure from the European Union, have again<\/p>\n and again invoked history or their versions of it. But<\/p>\n the speaker in 1962 wasn’t a Tory at all. He was Hugh Gaitskell,<\/p>\n the leader of the opposition, a moderate social Democrat leading the Labor Party<\/p>\n who would have ducked dislike to consider himself an internationalist and have repudiated<\/p>\n any charge of jingoism or nativism. History is<\/p>\n a very potent drug. Above all, national history.<\/p>\n The nineteenth century French writer outstripped all said that to be a nationalist required<\/p>\n two things. Hatred of your neighbors, an ignorance of your own history.<\/p>\n The second of which may ostensibly be less nasty, but may also<\/p>\n be even more dangerous. Certainly much of modern history is explained<\/p>\n by another phrase Jovana deleted the Italian. One hundred years<\/p>\n ago said that Kentucky countries were nourished and sustained by<\/p>\n beautiful national legends. The context itself was interesting.<\/p>\n Jollity was explaining why he didn’t want the Italian archives open to prying scholars<\/p>\n whose investigations might tend to undermine those beautiful legends. And<\/p>\n to be sure, the official version of the so-called ressource Demento was legendary enough.<\/p>\n So much of earlier history has been variously understood and misunderstood,<\/p>\n written and rewritten, appropriated and misappropriated,<\/p>\n used and abused. One could say that very nearly every nationalist movement<\/p>\n and Brexit is very much an English nationalist movement has partaken of rewritten<\/p>\n history. Intellectual dishonesty in some degree and<\/p>\n invented tradition all across 19th century Europe enthusiasts.<\/p>\n It reconstructed what had been dialects as national languages<\/p>\n rediscovered or sometimes simply made up ancient national epics<\/p>\n and antique documents on which could be based. Historic claims for independence or<\/p>\n own frontiers, irredentist or whatever. Even<\/p>\n those earliest Slovakian or Slovak enthusiasts, however, might<\/p>\n have been impressed by the appetite for dubious history mongering among our<\/p>\n Brexiteers members of the coyly named European<\/p>\n Research Group, of whom Jacob Rees-Mogg is only the most egregious,<\/p>\n have tried to ring out our US and make our flesh creep by variously, variously<\/p>\n citing the corn laws, King Henry the 8th and King John.<\/p>\n Some of these spoonfuls of potted history are quaint or contradictory or plain<\/p>\n wrong, but they’re all invoked for one purpose, and there’s one<\/p>\n date more intoxicating than any other<\/p>\n in the British Isles. To use a phrase which itself is now frowned on in some quarters,<\/p>\n our Celtic fringes have long been very prolific in this regard,<\/p>\n eagerly using the past for the purposes of the present, albeit very often<\/p>\n an imagined riposte. The classic case is the invented tradition of the Highlands,<\/p>\n about which first Lord McCallie, and then you, Trevor Roper, wrote Mr.<\/p>\n musingly. This was a confection. In any case. But it became<\/p>\n far more absurd when it was turned into the book for portrait culture,<\/p>\n not only of the Highlands and islands, but of the whole country, so that everyone<\/p>\n from five to Galloway was supposed to wear a kilt and play the bagpipes.<\/p>\n In 1821, King George. The fourth was the first Hanoverian monarch to visit<\/p>\n Scotland, where he held court at Holyrood and donned a kilt<\/p>\n worn over pink tights. Or, as Macaulay put it. The king<\/p>\n thought that he could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages<\/p>\n which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union of Seventeen Hundred and Seven.<\/p>\n Then, by disguising himself in what before the union was considered by nine<\/p>\n Scotchman out of ten as the dress of a thief.<\/p>\n That hasn’t stopped him. The modern Scottish nationalists come from conjuring up yet<\/p>\n more inventions from the new office of MUCKER, vaguely<\/p>\n like Poet Laureate. What I’ve tried to establish the etymology on, I believe<\/p>\n it’s not Gulick, but Scots Langlands<\/p>\n up to that dreadful dirge Flower of Scotland,<\/p>\n which celebrates the Battle of Bannockburn in thirteen fourteen, and was written about thirty<\/p>\n years ago by a Scottish folk singer. It’s become a kind of national anthem sung<\/p>\n by rugby fans, including one particularly foolish line where<\/p>\n Robert Bruces men fought for your wee bit Hill Helidon Glen.<\/p>\n Although most Scots live and have always lived in the lowlands far from hills and<\/p>\n glens, one might argue, as Trevor Roper did on one occasion<\/p>\n for all his derision, that this misunderstanding of their history and oblivion<\/p>\n of their real old intestine differences was less harmful<\/p>\n to the Scots than a much more accurate awareness of ancient conflicts<\/p>\n has been to the peoples of Ireland. All of modern. Irish nationalism,<\/p>\n notably the strain called Republicanism, has tried to wish those conflicts<\/p>\n away. I mean, the conflicts between what used to be called Saxon and Gayl<\/p>\n in particular, while at the same time exploiting them.<\/p>\n The late 18th century Irish rebel<\/p>\n Wolf Tone said the Protestant Catholic dissenter<\/p>\n should discard those identities for the common name of Irishmen, words which<\/p>\n are intoned quite often but by those who have spent much of their time and<\/p>\n energetically killing Protestants. I mean the Irish Republican Army.<\/p>\n For most of the last century, the Irish. I bet make about the Dublin government<\/p>\n made an irredentist claim on Northern Ireland. While for most of those years it was<\/p>\n governed by the party called the Soldiers of Destiny, or fionna, for<\/p>\n the Irish national anthem is the sanguinary of song mydd cannons,<\/p>\n roar and rifles. Will Charge A Soldier’s Soul, which begins<\/p>\n in Irish Gaelic Chinna Fianna Fail. And this is, I think, the<\/p>\n only country anywhere where the ruling party’s name was sung. In the first line of the national anthem,<\/p>\n Unifor and its rival Fine Gael, or the band of Gael’s who are in<\/p>\n government at present in Dublin, like Doyle for the Parliament and Teashop for the Prime<\/p>\n Minister, are all fine pieces of invented tradition conjured up<\/p>\n from the Mists and Middle Ages. It would be unkind to say that Ireland is<\/p>\n again the only country where leaders and parties are given names in a dead language.<\/p>\n But teh shock might certainly seem an unfortunate name today. It was chosen<\/p>\n or invented in the 1930s and doesn’t actually mean Prime Minister. It means leader<\/p>\n like dooce or fuera, a fashionable type of name on the line. At the time,<\/p>\n this was part of a larger invention seen in the name of Republicanism<\/p>\n and its claim to the whole island of Ireland. This republicanism<\/p>\n has been continued, inspired by dreams and only partly imaginary past<\/p>\n from the incursion of Strongbow and the Anglo Norman Knights in the 20th century, to<\/p>\n pointing more to the curse of Cromwell and the Battle of the Boyne and the famine.<\/p>\n The implication is that some distant policy, some distant polity<\/p>\n lost to English oppression would be restored. Although no Irish Republican<\/p>\n indeed no Irish state ever existed before the twentieth century. My late<\/p>\n friend Fred Halliday, a great scholar of Iran and the Arab world<\/p>\n and an Irishman himself, once suggested that if his compatriots<\/p>\n really wanted a great national hero to venerate, they should choose him.<\/p>\n Who first created a united Ireland King Henry the eighth.<\/p>\n On the other hand, Orangemen had their own invigorating dreams of the past as they sang about<\/p>\n the old cause that gave us our freedoms, religion and laws and<\/p>\n our fathers sash one of Derry under him and his skillern on the Boyne.<\/p>\n One hears less of that nowadays, and in any case, Irish<\/p>\n Ulster Protestants don’t seem very popular in the United States nowadays, although here’s<\/p>\n another piece of historical amnesia. The figures sometimes cited of 20 million<\/p>\n Irish Americans, or sometimes even more than that. But most of them are actually<\/p>\n what old fashioned Americans call Scotch-Irish descent did not from the<\/p>\n green famine Irish who emigrated from the 1840s onwards, but from Ulster Presbyterians<\/p>\n who’d emigrated to a century earlier. One might add that for all the tragic martyrdom<\/p>\n of Catholic Ireland in the century that followed William of Orange, his victory at the Battle<\/p>\n of the Boyne in 60 90 without King billion’s victory, the United<\/p>\n States of America could not possibly exist. And there’s something else<\/p>\n writing about nationalism and national history. And who can and can’t write it?<\/p>\n The late E.J. Hobsbawm said that while a proud attachment, either the Irish<\/p>\n Catholic or Ulster Protestant tradition might be compatible<\/p>\n with the serious study of Irish history, to be a Fenian or Orangemen<\/p>\n would not be so compatible, in my view, any more than being a Zionist is<\/p>\n compatible with writing serious, serious history of the Jews. The<\/p>\n line about Zionist might be debatable. There aren’t many Orangemen writing history<\/p>\n nowadays anyway. But there are plenty of books written by self-proclaimed<\/p>\n Fenians or Republicans. And those books are, without exception, worthless.<\/p>\n All of that might seem a little harsh coming from an Englishman and it might seem a<\/p>\n digression. But then my theme is My own country, which needs<\/p>\n no lessons in national mythmaking. In the forefront<\/p>\n of late have been those Brexiteers.<\/p>\n This not of fewer than 100 euro phobic Tory MP<\/p>\n is in the House of Commons who have dictated the political narrative<\/p>\n for some time past eight years ago, they bullied David Cameron. Then<\/p>\n newly installed as prime minister in coalition with a strongly pro-European<\/p>\n Liberal Democrats into promising such a referendum if the Tories win<\/p>\n an outright parliamentary majority at the next election. There have<\/p>\n been very few referendums in the United Kingdom. The first was in 1975.<\/p>\n Despite his earlier reluctance, Harold Wilson called a referendum then<\/p>\n on whether we should remain as members of the EEC, which we joined two years<\/p>\n earlier. Under Edward Heath, Tory government, this was a tactical maneuver on Wilson’s<\/p>\n part to get around divisions within his own Labor Party and indeed<\/p>\n at the time of the referendum as two years ago. Both of the larger<\/p>\n parties were divided from within over the question of Europe. On that occasion,<\/p>\n in 1975, the vote to remain in the EEC<\/p>\n was won easily by the Romayne. Upon the vote<\/p>\n remain was won easily 30 years later in the summer of 2004.<\/p>\n Tony Blair astonished and horrified his close allies Europhiles<\/p>\n by promising after the blue that a referendum would be held on whether to invoke endorse<\/p>\n the newly promulgated European constitution. This was the result of a private<\/p>\n deal between Blair and Rupert Murdoch, who promised in return<\/p>\n the support of his tabloid newspaper The Sun in the British general election, which was<\/p>\n due to follow the next year, the next spring. In the event<\/p>\n that general election coincided with referendums in which the Dutch<\/p>\n and more importantly, the French rejected the new European constitution<\/p>\n a month after the general election in which Blair was returned to office of professional<\/p>\n gain, a parliamentary majority was only 35 percent of the popular vote. Mr<\/p>\n Blair told the House of Commons that following the French and Dutch votes,<\/p>\n there is no point in having a referendum because of the uncertainty it would produce.<\/p>\n At that point, Angela Browning, a Tory backbencher, reminded the prime minister of what<\/p>\n he had told the Sun three weeks earlier. Even if the French voted no, we would have a referendum.<\/p>\n That is a government promise. When Cameron gave his own promise,<\/p>\n he half hoped that he wouldn’t have to honor it. But he lacked Wilson’s guile<\/p>\n or Blair’s shamelessness, and he found himself trapped in<\/p>\n search of the referendum. The victory of leave and Cameron’s abrupt departure.<\/p>\n How do you know a little more history himself? He might have refused to hold a referendum at all in the first<\/p>\n place. By way of citing the two outstanding prime ministers<\/p>\n since the war. Outstanding, at any rate, in the two prime ministers whose governments<\/p>\n changed the country and changed the political landscape in 1945.<\/p>\n Winston Churchill, who is still prime minister in the wartime coalition government,<\/p>\n wanted to hold a referendum, which would have been the first ever in Great Britain on extending<\/p>\n the life of the parliament. But Clement Atlee, who was the leader<\/p>\n of the Labor Party and was at the time his deputy prime minister in that coalition,<\/p>\n and who was short but to wrote Churchill and the Tories and the great Labor landslide,<\/p>\n replied, I could not consent. I could not possibly consent to<\/p>\n the introduction into our national life of advice so alien to all our traditions.<\/p>\n As the referendum, which was only too often been used as the instrument of Naziism<\/p>\n and fascism, and 30 years later, Margaret Thatcher, who<\/p>\n was then the newly elected conservative leader of the opposition, said that<\/p>\n the late Lord Atley was right when he said the referendums were the device of dictators<\/p>\n and demagogs. This is these are two cases of<\/p>\n a useful citation of history. We<\/p>\n dont have fascism in England as yet or a dictator, but we have plenty of demagogs.<\/p>\n And the referendum was an exercise in necked naked demagogy.<\/p>\n This is something that the Brexiteers, not surprisingly, are reluctant to admit.<\/p>\n But then there are the problems that seem to elude them for all their delight in parading<\/p>\n what they think of as their historical knowledge. A number of prominent figures<\/p>\n in their ranks are Roman Catholics by upbringing or by conversion.<\/p>\n The former conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, the MP is William Cash<\/p>\n and Rees-Mogg were born Catholics and Charles Moore, sometime<\/p>\n editor of The Spectator and Daily Telegraph. For both of which he still writes columns<\/p>\n left the Church of England for the Roman Catholic Church in protest of the ordination of women.<\/p>\n A Brexit apart that all Thatcherites or what Cane’s would have called<\/p>\n less a fair is that is they favor the untrammeled free enterprise<\/p>\n and free market principles of the Manchester School of Economics, which means<\/p>\n that their grasp of moral and pastoral theology is as shaky as that of history.<\/p>\n They seem not to be aware even that this Manchester<\/p>\n school market economic liberal is one of the very few such doctrines<\/p>\n to have been specifically and repeatedly condemned by the Vatican,<\/p>\n at least since 1891. And Pete Pope Leo the Trent the 13ths<\/p>\n great encyclical rorem Novarro. But that’s only a small part<\/p>\n of their curious and curiously weakish and Protestant reading of history.<\/p>\n One word which has become beguiling, important to the Brexiteers<\/p>\n is vassel or Vassilieva, which had otherwise disappeared from<\/p>\n common currency. Although as it’s been revived, it does speak to a certain sentimental<\/p>\n yearning that you’re earning and sometimes harmless enough.<\/p>\n Every summer, the BBC Promenade concerts at the Albert Hall gives one of the greatest<\/p>\n music festivals in Europe. You can buy a season ticket for<\/p>\n the problems if you’re strong enough to stand through every concert, which I might have been once, but I’m no<\/p>\n longer myself for the entire season for the same price<\/p>\n or rather less than the same price as a single store’s ticket for the opera festival<\/p>\n at Saltzberg. It culminates in September<\/p>\n with the last night of the problems of Frolick some event<\/p>\n when the audience joined in singing patriotic songs with a cheerful lack of irony.<\/p>\n They still sing Land of Hope and Glory, with the land lines<\/p>\n wider yet and further shall light bones be set. Generations after<\/p>\n those bones stopped being set further and contracted to where<\/p>\n they began. And then comes that 18th century tub thumper<\/p>\n Rule Britannia. Britannia rules the waves. Britons never, never, never shall<\/p>\n be slaves whose words by James Thompson didn’t<\/p>\n show much irony even at the time when, however, they might have been.<\/p>\n Britain certainly owned and traded plenty of slaves for<\/p>\n the Brexiteers. Britons never, never, never shall be vassals.<\/p>\n Once again, Jacob Rees-Mogg was to the fore from a more recent<\/p>\n date. He has decried the way Sir Robert Peel repealed the corn laws<\/p>\n in 1846. He deplores that is the way that Piel enlisted<\/p>\n the support of opposition m.p.’s in the House of Commons. Despite the defection<\/p>\n of a large number of his own Tories, that was indeed the case. And it was one of<\/p>\n the three such episodes in the 19th century, which may have been what Bismarck had<\/p>\n in mind with his rule of English politics. The progressive governments take<\/p>\n office to pass reactionary measures, while reactionary governments take office to<\/p>\n pass progressive measures.<\/p>\n The third case. After that second one was the Second Reform Act<\/p>\n in 1867, which expanded the franchise, but the first<\/p>\n was the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829 by the Duke of Wellington’s Mission<\/p>\n Ministry. If Mr. Rees-Mogg deplores the repeal of the corn laws,<\/p>\n then he ought logically to oppose free trade and support<\/p>\n the protectionist corn laws. And by implication, he ought also<\/p>\n to sympathize with the high Tory Ultra’s of that time who fought to the end against<\/p>\n Killock Catholic emancipation. And you ought to regret that he and his coreligionists<\/p>\n are able to practice their faith at all. Not that logic seems to have much to do with it.<\/p>\n In this Brexit debate.<\/p>\n But that’s only the most recent example. Mr. Rees-Mogg takes us back<\/p>\n much further to the turn of the 13th century, and he anathema<\/p>\n tice’s the government white paper on terms for departing the European Union<\/p>\n by calling it the greatest vassal edge since King John paid homage to<\/p>\n Philip the second lulay in twelve hundred.<\/p>\n They talk of little else in the pub pubs of Sunday London to an athlete which voted<\/p>\n strongly for leave. Once again, he seems a little<\/p>\n selective in his use of history. King John Lost Norman touches the French. It’s true.<\/p>\n But he also stood up for a time to the papacy, which is to say to innocent. The third,<\/p>\n the most imperious of medieval popes. A Jew and Muslim hating crusader.<\/p>\n But really listening to Rees-Mogg at that point reminds some of us a certain age of Tony<\/p>\n Hancock, the English comedian, with his patriotic peroration.<\/p>\n And what of Magna Carta? Did she die in vain?<\/p>\n Then we come forward a century to find yet another Brexit. Yo! Whispering The last<\/p>\n enchantments of the Middle Ages. Boris Johnson is the journalist turned politician<\/p>\n who served briefly as foreign secretary and is at present an apparent serious contender<\/p>\n to succeed Theresa May. It’s true that there are those like the<\/p>\n journalist and historian Sir Max Hastings, once strong science editor of The Daily Telegraph,<\/p>\n who dismisses his erstwhile colleague as a sex or adventurer, a charlatan.<\/p>\n Although, come to think of it, a glance at the White House suggests that there’s may not be absolute disqualifications<\/p>\n for high office in these strange times. Johnson made another<\/p>\n pick out of the historical lucky dip to suggest that the authors of the Checkers<\/p>\n proposal risk prosecution under the 14th century statute of Prima NERA,<\/p>\n which says that no foreign court or government shall have jurisdiction in this country.<\/p>\n Never mind that the statute of Private Neira was repealed long ago.<\/p>\n Then the Brexiteers romantics<\/p>\n move on to the 16th century when Charles Moore denounced the Archbishop of<\/p>\n Canterbury for saying something or other insufficiently patriotic.<\/p>\n He added that the Archbishop we’re looking at Brexit to remember the act in restraint<\/p>\n of appeals. After all, if it had not been passed, his church would not exist<\/p>\n and he would not be living in Lambeth Palace and making speeches in the House of Lords.<\/p>\n That act was part of the process by which England broke with Rome. It was inspired, of course, by Henry Yates,<\/p>\n the desire to be rid of his wife, Anne Boleyn,<\/p>\n and by which in the end England became a fiercely processand country.<\/p>\n So if he follows his own argument, Moore should presumably reluctantly lament<\/p>\n the fact the Jesuits and Roman Catholic country gentlemen are no longer disemboweled. Tyburn<\/p>\n in 1859. I beg of on the first of the Brexiteers,<\/p>\n I should say, to have cited the act in restraint of appeals. Forgive my dizziness<\/p>\n as I continue with these most implausible recitations<\/p>\n was Sir John Redwood. He has been a Tory MP for more than 30 years<\/p>\n and had a brief ministerial career which included a spell of Secretary of State of Way for<\/p>\n Wales when he tried not at all successfully to sing parrot fashion.<\/p>\n My hen Lord Vaughn had-I the rousing Welsh anthem Land of My Fathers, also sung<\/p>\n by rugby fans and incidentally, much the best of the rugby anthems<\/p>\n compared with the Scottish and Irish ones, possibly<\/p>\n compared with God Save the Queen. Later, Redwood was part of a plot by Europhobes<\/p>\n to overthrow John Major in nineteen ninety five. Now he is a man<\/p>\n of some academic standing. An Oxford history graduate p_h_d_.<\/p>\n Or the D Phil, as we say at the old place. A Fellow of All Souls and the author of<\/p>\n Reason Ridicule Under the Age of Enlightenment in England Sixteen Sixty<\/p>\n to 1750. But he knows some history. He doesn’t let us forget it.<\/p>\n He was the first of the Brexiteers to fight to cite the fifty and thirty three act and restraint<\/p>\n of appeals, which claims by diverse sundry old authentic histories and<\/p>\n chronicles. It has manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is<\/p>\n an empire, and so has been accepted in the world. A statement which was at<\/p>\n the time entirely untrue. If anything, at that time,<\/p>\n England was regarded by the rest of Europe as a satellite of the Empire,<\/p>\n and Scotland was a rather less important satellite of France. The curious<\/p>\n thing is that it does belong to a<\/p>\n tradition. I sense of history, but of history mongering. It is one which<\/p>\n began to flourish in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries and evolved into what<\/p>\n Herbert Butterfield would later and famously denounce as the Whig interpretation of history.<\/p>\n It invoked an ancient constitution dating from Anglo-Saxon times<\/p>\n before the court and the Mormon conquest and the Mormon yoke, under which monarchy had<\/p>\n supposedly been contractual and reform guided by common law and parliament,<\/p>\n which held the kings who brought the contract, had been rightly brought down from<\/p>\n their seats. It was the second in 13 27, Richard, the second in thirteen ninety<\/p>\n nine. Charles the first. And still more dramatic fashion sixty and forty nine. And James<\/p>\n the second in sixteen 88. The great Elizabethan jurists, Edward<\/p>\n Cook went even further back when you managed to trace this constitution beyond the<\/p>\n Anglo-Saxons to the ancient Britons.<\/p>\n I can. Restraint of appeals was toughened up in<\/p>\n fifty and fifty nine by the act of supremacy, which has yet again been<\/p>\n cited by the Brexiteers. It was law which held that no foreign prince,<\/p>\n person, prelate, state or potentate, or ought to have any jurisdiction,<\/p>\n power, superiority of preeminence or authority, ecclesiastical<\/p>\n or spiritual within this realm. This was the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s rain<\/p>\n rain, which has been woven into the very tapestry of English<\/p>\n beautiful national legend. It may<\/p>\n have been a misfortune. I sometimes think that the greatest of English writers lived in that<\/p>\n rain. Michael Billington of The Guardian, who’s the outstanding theater critic<\/p>\n of our time, in my view, has plausibly suggested that it’s the history of plays<\/p>\n rather than the tragedies which we should regard as the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s genius.<\/p>\n And yet those great players are what Hollywood calls flag wavers or frankly,<\/p>\n agitprop on behalf of the Tudor dynasty. And they give a grisly, tendentious version<\/p>\n of 14th and 15th century history. Other later and lesser<\/p>\n writers would extoll the sea dogs of good queen best as rain<\/p>\n in Victorian days. Tennyson wrote The Revenge with its tale of Sir Richard Gribble<\/p>\n and his heroism. Sink mother ship master gonna sink her splitter in twain.<\/p>\n Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain.<\/p>\n It has occurred to me that Theresa May might sometimes have thought, while going into meetings<\/p>\n with the European leaders of the next line, and they praised him to his face with their courtly<\/p>\n foreign grace. Not that she’s been getting much praise herself recently.<\/p>\n Then Sir Henry Newbold beat Drake’s drum tricks in his hammock a thousand<\/p>\n miles away. But as the Dons site Devon, he’ll quit the Port of heaven and drum<\/p>\n up the channels. We run them long ago. Of course, none of those could touch<\/p>\n the heights of Shakespeare and Henry. The fifth cry God for Harry England and St<\/p>\n George, a patriotic legend has been often conjured up before<\/p>\n now and before these recent events and in better causes.<\/p>\n It was not by accident that Laurence Olivier’s movie of Henry the Fifth<\/p>\n was made in 1944, just as another English army was fighting in Normandy.<\/p>\n And on the 6th of June that year, there were English infantry subalterns who steeled themselves<\/p>\n as their landing craft approached Juno Beach with the thought and gentlemen<\/p>\n in England. Now, Abed, she’ll think themselves, of course. They were not here.<\/p>\n It seems almost churlish at this point to observe that Drake and those other Elizabethan sea dogs<\/p>\n were in fact pirates, and that King Henry was a war criminal whose slaughter<\/p>\n of the French prisoners at Agincourt horrified Christian Europe at the time.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, so potent memories of Shakespeare’s age. When our present queen acceded<\/p>\n to the throne in 1952, there was much excited chatter in the press<\/p>\n about a new Elizabethan age. And as that great historian<\/p>\n Sir Michael Howard said, this was truer than those who used the phrase at the time<\/p>\n knew for once again we were, as we had been then, a part<\/p>\n of the second rank, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and puncturing far beyond<\/p>\n our weight in international affairs. But one date above<\/p>\n all others overshadows I beg your pardon. One date overshadows<\/p>\n any other in the great romance of Brexit.<\/p>\n His life stopped in 1914, says Hester, the heroine<\/p>\n of Terence ratigan’s play Flight Path, talking about her faithless, sudden<\/p>\n lover, a former fighter pilot. He loved making 40.<\/p>\n You know, there were some like that. Well, yes.<\/p>\n Winston Churchill was certainly like that. And so his implausible epic own’s of UKIP<\/p>\n in the IRG. But then it sometimes seems that we<\/p>\n English all love 1940. It’s become our most<\/p>\n powerful, beautiful national legend. And too often one<\/p>\n feels that our life as a nation stopped in 1940, as Esther puts it,<\/p>\n and that we’ve never come to terms with that heroic moment.<\/p>\n If a study in beautiful national legends rewritten history and invented tradition<\/p>\n when needed, it would be the way that different countries have dealt with the legacy of the World<\/p>\n War, which ended in 1945. The English<\/p>\n are by no means unique in their capacity for inventing<\/p>\n tradition or rewritten history. The most remarkable, perhaps, was Charles<\/p>\n de Gaulle’s legend that the French people, apart from a handful of cowards and traitors,<\/p>\n have been united in their determination to resist the German conqueror and the German occupation.<\/p>\n The more somber truth is that for most of the war, most French people may have been subjective<\/p>\n resisters in wishing to be rid of the drones. But most were objective collaborators<\/p>\n in the sense of accepting the occupation. Plenty of Frenchmen and women actively<\/p>\n collaborated with drome and with the Germans in their most terrible crimes a truth that took<\/p>\n the French Republic not years, but generations to acknowledge. Military historians<\/p>\n have pointed out the striking fact that between 1939 and 1945, more French<\/p>\n soldiers fought on the side of the axis and the allies. In the course<\/p>\n of creating a new democratic German federal republic, it wasn’t so<\/p>\n much convenient as essential to exaggerate the importance of the so-called German<\/p>\n resistance and to overlook the fact which has been more recently dissected<\/p>\n by much Drummond’s scholarship that very many of those who served that Federal Republic<\/p>\n had formerly served the Third Reich. Some of them in senior positions and with shameful<\/p>\n records. The Russians had no need to create a myth of military valor, since<\/p>\n it was a matter of historical fact. The development was defeated by the Red Army,<\/p>\n but Stalin added his own legend when he insisted that after this war,<\/p>\n no one dared any more to deny the vitality of the Soviet state system. And<\/p>\n thus that victory had validated his Five-Year Plans. Slave labor<\/p>\n and or much less recognized, I suggest, has been the American version.<\/p>\n The slow, subtle process of turning that war into the good war.<\/p>\n If you visit the remarkable National Museum of World War 2 in New Orleans, for<\/p>\n example, with its extraordinary collection of aircraft tanks and landing craft,<\/p>\n you might easily leave under the impression that the war had been simply a contest between the United States<\/p>\n and the Third Reich. And this connects, I think, with the extravagant American<\/p>\n cult of Winston Churchill. No, well-nigh seen as the man who<\/p>\n inspired the American people to resist Hitler and then led him to victory against him.<\/p>\n What’s been obscured by this is the fact that for most of the American people, for most of the<\/p>\n years, from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay, the war meant the war in the Pacific.<\/p>\n And as Dwight Macdonald said at the time, not the least ironical aspect of this most ironical<\/p>\n of wars was the fact that the war in the Pacific has always been more popular<\/p>\n with all prices of Americans than the war in Europe,<\/p>\n since it was, as he said, impossible to portray that conflict with Japan as a good war<\/p>\n rather than a straightforward imperial contest for mastery. A steady,<\/p>\n subtle revision was necessary over many years<\/p>\n to turn the war in. One might say in movie terms,<\/p>\n from the sounds of it, were Jima to Saving Private Ryan.<\/p>\n And yet, no other country, I think I can say, without<\/p>\n any patriotic pride of my own, has matched our beautiful national legend<\/p>\n in England. Iconic has become an eye and annoying<\/p>\n vogue word as the great hsw founder of modern English usage would have called it.<\/p>\n But sometimes it’s apt enough, and an iconography of Sir Winston Churchill<\/p>\n could be compiled by now. It’s hard to keep count of the times<\/p>\n that Churchill’s visage has appeared on the front page of The Sun and The Daily Mail.<\/p>\n Our two most popular tabloids urging Brexit in one way or another.<\/p>\n One word is the yes, indeed iconic photograph<\/p>\n of Churchill taken by Karsh of Ottawa in 1941,<\/p>\n angrily defiant. Another is the statue by Ivan Robert<\/p>\n Jones, which broods over Parliament Square.<\/p>\n I dont you know, it was a downtime session. I dont haven’t prepared myself<\/p>\n for a TED talk. So if you haven’t seen it, it is a huge statue of Churchill<\/p>\n leaning forward, wearing a great kid with his shoulders hunched, looking towards the<\/p>\n Palace of Westminster. I passed.<\/p>\n Not long ago. A very superior art dealer in<\/p>\n St James’s when I was leaving the London Library and noticed<\/p>\n beyond the plate glass at the back where there were three Renoir’s, I think. But in the front was<\/p>\n Churchill, and it was a bronze replica of the market<\/p>\n from which the statue in Parliament Square was made. It’s about that high.<\/p>\n These bronze replicas have been cast in bronze. Five<\/p>\n hundred of them. They are on sale for one hundred and seventy five thousand pounds each,<\/p>\n or just under two hundred thousand dollars. And I worked out of that, came to about eighty million<\/p>\n dollars, if they’re also. Which they may very well be. Not not only is the Churchill<\/p>\n cult a remarkable phenomenon. The Churchill business is what we call a nice little earner.<\/p>\n Only the other day there was a photograph in the newspaper of a man sitting in front<\/p>\n of that statue in Parliament Square draped in the Union Jack across, which<\/p>\n were the words leave means leave. That<\/p>\n phrase, by the way, was coined by Theresa May. After the time<\/p>\n she became prime minister, I was<\/p>\n delighted. The following summer, therefore the summer of 2017, when<\/p>\n dining at my old Oxford College New College to run into Robin Lane<\/p>\n Fox, the eminent ancient historian. And you told me something that cheered me up<\/p>\n in the previous term was modern paper models as the fifth term<\/p>\n examined classical moderations Latin and Greek, which precedes the<\/p>\n subsequent exam called grades, and it contains a logic paper and that<\/p>\n one of the questions in the logic paper had been, quote, Leave means leave.<\/p>\n I beg your pardon. It didn’t wasn’t. Quote the other phrase, Brexit<\/p>\n means Brexit, the exam paper question was, quote, Brexit<\/p>\n means Brexit. Analyze this statement and discuss what meaning it has, if any.<\/p>\n I felt a little flicker of pride in my old university.<\/p>\n Much of the blame lies with Churchill himself. He said that summer<\/p>\n of 1940 that we are fighting by ourselves alone, but not for ourselves<\/p>\n alone. And later he spoke about the time when we were alone.<\/p>\n Not a few people have been reminded lately of David loh’s famous cartoon published<\/p>\n immediately after Dunkirk, a Tommy on the cliffs of Dover, a rifle<\/p>\n to his side, punching the with the defiant words very well<\/p>\n alone. It was a coincidence, happier for<\/p>\n some than others, that the movies Dunkirk and Darkest Hour,<\/p>\n both set in 1914, came out a year after the referendum. And in<\/p>\n the same year 2017, there was another film called Churchill set in 1944,<\/p>\n which came and went, as I think I’ve forgotten.<\/p>\n Both of those movies are pretty good travesties of history. Darkest hour, preposterously<\/p>\n so. And they’ve had an effect far from what their makers intended,<\/p>\n with Charles Moore yet again claiming darkest hour as a splendid Brexit film.<\/p>\n It’s no pedantic quibble to point out that we weren’t alone even in 1948.<\/p>\n We had the countries of the Commonwealth<\/p>\n fighting with us voluntarily. We had many hundreds of thousands<\/p>\n of soldiers in the Indian army, all volunteers.<\/p>\n We had the. Exile’s governments and fighting forces<\/p>\n of the European countries, which have been conquered by Germany and from the Polish and<\/p>\n Czech fighter pilots who helped win the Battle of Britain to the Dutch and Norwegian sailors<\/p>\n who helped win the Battle of the Atlantic. And in any<\/p>\n case, the most pernicious myth of all.<\/p>\n Which I think really has grown during my lifetime was that we<\/p>\n won the war. Face it, General, said<\/p>\n the writer on trying to Santic stupidity, defeating the goals own self-promoter, self-promoting<\/p>\n national legend. France was defeated and our allies won.<\/p>\n Something of the same might have been said to Churchill if anyone had been brave enough to say so.<\/p>\n Instead, there was an intense mixture of pride and relief when victory came,<\/p>\n followed by a very slow realization that the fruits of victory for the British<\/p>\n were by no means all sweet. As for a financial<\/p>\n crisis was followed by imperial retreat and then by comparison<\/p>\n to comparative economic decline. And finally today,<\/p>\n a national paralysis. After 1918, the Italian<\/p>\n nationalist Gabrielli Dumitru coined the phrase Vittoria Mutu laughter.<\/p>\n Italy had won the war, he said, entirely wrongly, but lost the peace.<\/p>\n And behind because it had not acquired the territorial gains which<\/p>\n had been most corruptly promised secretly by the other allies during the war<\/p>\n behind the rage of the Brexiteers lies a sense that we too had<\/p>\n suffered a mutilated victory. Now, cutting ourselves<\/p>\n off from Europe, as we did at Dunkirk in a rather different way means that we can somehow redeem<\/p>\n that humiliation.<\/p>\n The Third Reich did not last 2000 years, nor did Churchill’s<\/p>\n British Empire last a thousand years. Whether there is any real<\/p>\n purpose in voting as you Gaitskell did, a thousand years of history seems<\/p>\n at present very doubtful. One of the true heroes of 1948<\/p>\n was the Henry Tizard, a physicist, president of Modern College Oxford<\/p>\n and not least a great patriotic Englishman who maybe said without exaggeration,<\/p>\n to have helped save his country. He was a go between. That is, between<\/p>\n the scientists of academe and the officials of Whitehall. And without his work<\/p>\n in ensuring the radar was installed round the coastline, the battle of Britain<\/p>\n might have been lost in 1940. Nine years later, he wrote a minute<\/p>\n which the Brexiteers, with all their dreams of past glory from this<\/p>\n realm of England, is an empire, too. Very well alone, mightve<\/p>\n he did. We persist in regarding ourselves as a great<\/p>\n part. As I wrote in 1949, capable of everything and only temporarily<\/p>\n handicapped by economic difficulties, which is precisely what the Brexiteers say<\/p>\n today. We are not a great power. He went on,<\/p>\n and never will be again. We are a great nation, but if we continue<\/p>\n to behave like a great power, we shall soon cease to be a great nation.<\/p>\n That could be an epigraph or epitaph for my country’s story during<\/p>\n my lifetime, culminating in our latest national nervous breakdown<\/p>\n at times of crisis. Myths have their historical importance. Churchill said<\/p>\n in 1940. And to be sure, he was right then.<\/p>\n But at other times of crisis. Myths can be dangerous or even disastrous.<\/p>\n Thank you.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/148\/brexit-an-historical-romance.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/148\/brexit-an-historical-romance.mp3","audio_player":"