In the next couple of days the nostalgia fest in Britain will climax. Unfortunately for the Conservative and Labour parties the seventy-fifth anniversary of the D-Day landings coincides with the Peterborough by-election. This allows the recycled UKIP party, now called the Brexit party, to win, wallowing in the origin myth of twenty-first century Britain and reinforcing their fantasy of standing alone against the EU and ‘restoring’ Britain’s sovereignty.
All nonsense of course, but Britain’s appalling racist, xenophobic tabloids and popular TV and film industry have fed the public on this diet for seventy-five years. During this week you’ll have been force fed indigestible quantities of entirely false sentimental schmaltz designed to repeat the myth that Britain played the decisive role in World War II with the US army and Red Army playing bit parts.
The truth is that the Normandy landings were a side show. The decisive battles of the war were fought on the eastern front between the Wehrmacht and the gigantic Red Army, millions strong, with hundreds of rifle divisions and tank brigades. They fought the biggest land battles in history including the biggest tank battle in history. As for the Americans who supplied the hardware, the petrol, the bulk of the manpower for Normandy, they had bigger fish to fry in the Pacific. A couple of weeks after Normandy the US Marine Corps and US army landed a seaborne invasion force in the Marianas just ten thousand fewer than D-Day, supported by over 600 ships and thousands of aircraft.
The rest of the world has moved on, but not Britain. After the war Britain was broke. They didn’t finish paying off the loans the Americans provided until 2008; the Americans took every penny. The British lost their murderous, slave-driving empire, though the Conservatives in the 1950s tried to hang on to it, slaughtering tens of thousands in Malaya, Borneo, Kenya, Rhodesia, the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere until Harold Macmillan called a halt.
Other European countries that had empires, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, long ago came to terms with the loss, most painful in the case of France which nearly succumbed to civil war in 1958-60 over withdrawing from Algeria.
Last week Michel Barnier put his finger on it when he told the New York Review of Books that the causes of Brexit were, ‘the hope for a return to a powerful global Britain, nostalgia for the past.’ He added, ‘nostalgia serves no purpose in politics.’ It does in Britain however. It helps to get you elected. All the protagonists in the Tory leadership contest quote Churchill and Thatcher with approval and Thatcher repeatedly quoted ‘Winston’ as she called him. They talk of ‘standing alone’ as in 1940. They ignore conveniently that poor little underdog Britain ran the biggest empire in the world then and committed thousands of Indians and Africans to the war effort.
Britain is now at a crossroads. If the nutters in the Conservative party, cheered on by their fawning DUP imitators, succeed in driving through a hard Brexit, even a no deal Brexit, then they will discover the hard way that Britain is just a medium-sized European country. There will be no Empire 2.0, economic or otherwise. It looks like at last Britain will have to confront its past, but the country will have to do it in poverty and decline which would have been entirely avoidable if they’d stayed in the EU. As Jacques Delors said decades ago when Britain refused to contemplate giving up the pound sterling, ‘It’s not for economic reasons, it’s a psycho-political problem.’ That’s exactly what Britain is facing, or rather, failing to face at the moment.
As the historian David Olusoga has written, Britain needs to start decolonising its history and its self-image. In that way, and through such a process he says, ‘Britain will in effect become the last country to leave the British empire’.
Unfortunately there’s no sign any of this is likely to happen. The events of this week and the repetition of the nauseating myths of British exceptionalism and superiority, the denial of historical reality, all confirm that Britain is going to find out the hard way that the past is another country.
