Let’s have a look at how No Deal preparations
are going, shall we?
Ahhhhhh
Impact assessments have anticipated that if
the UK leaves the European Union on WTO terms,
there’d be massive job losses, shortages
of medicine, staffing shortages in our NHS
and social care services, and Kent would probably
get turned into one giant lorry park. Which
might be an improvement
But it’s not all bad!!
Far as I’m concerned it’d do the country
good to go without food once in a while
make them appreciate what they’ve had
4 million people in this country are already
relying on foodbanks right now and it’s
not been great for so far. I suppose this
is just some of that famous Brexit blitz spirit
which will kick in and see us through the
most complicated constitutional process since
the Reformation.
Things tend to get a bit hairy when someone
from Novara starts talking about the war but
here goes.
World War II exerts a powerful force on this
country’s collective cultural memory. Piers
Morgan can’t even go a whole year without
inviting another guest so he can bray at length
about how Winston Churchill’s handling of
the Bengal Famine was actually good.
It’s not a question of historical study.
It’s borderline hysteria. You should be
able to make statements of fact about Churchill’s
views about ‘beastly’ Indians, the need
to forcibly sterilise 100,000 ‘degenerate’
Britons, and his sloganising ‘Keep England
White’ without being called a ‘thick ginger
turd’ by a daytime TV host.
But it’s worth thinking about why valid
criticisms of Churchill inspire coronaries
in middle-aged men whose closest brush with
the Western front is a boozy weekend in the
Dordogne. It’s because our memory of World
War II has very little to do with the struggles
of those who lived and died then, but how
we view ourselves now.
We can keep thinking ourselves as a plucky
archipelago, whose sovereignty has been trampled
by mean foreigners, rather than confront the
fact that Britain always constructed its political
power overseas - first through empire, then
through the Commonwealth and the European
Economic Community.
Our supposedly stolen independence is an absolute
myth: we gave it up, wholeheartedly, in the
pursuit of geoeconomic dominance.
And the more that commentators valorise hardship
of the kind that they didn’t have to live
through themselves, the more they naturalise
the idea that working class people have to
suffer for the decisions which have been made
by elites.
There’s no hope for Britain if we hold onto
the view that our best years are to be found
in Blitz. A better future means learning our
history properly - and getting real about World War II.
