The great Lie of Empire ... and why Brexit Britain is entering a dark period

The lead Brexiteers became giddy at the prospect of freeing the UK from Europe’s shackles and, for a time, seemed to become caricatures of themselves, feeding their supporters distorted images from a perverted history.

Admittedly, it’s almost impossible to caricature Jacob Rees-Mogg, who seems to have based his entire life on a parody of a certain type of Englishness. The Tory MP often appeals to a fairytale past in which Britain was at its greatest and ruled the civilised and uncivilised world. At a fringe event during the Conservative Party conference in October 2017, he extolled the virtues of Brexit to a group of cheering supporters: “This is Magna Carta; it’s the Burgesses coming at Parliament; it’s the Great Reform bill; it’s the Bill of Rights. It’s Waterloo; it’s Agincourt; it’s Crecy. We win all of these things.”

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When someone in the crowd shouted “Trafalgar!” a by-then almost delirious Rees-Mogg replied: “And Trafalgar, absolutely.”

This strange and disturbing event happened at a time of peak Brexit when the UK was still comfortably around 18 months away from the reality of leaving the EU. Thus it was easy to whip up fervour from young Tory types who, having arrived at this place on the sails of the privileges enjoyed by Rees-Mogg, had never yet discovered what that thing called “The Real World” is.

The reality of Brexit hadn’t yet begun to percolate into the thought processes of these people. The Irish backstop wasn’t an issue and multinationals hadn’t yet begun pulling out of the UK. Japanese car manufacturing in the UK was still buoyant. This seemed to be their time. No chemically induced acid trip ever scrambled the senses as much as Brexit did at this time to Rees-Mogg and his supporters.

Of course, he could never have made that speech in very many other places in the UK. Those words recalling the staging posts of an Empire built for the exclusive enrichment of England’s aristocracy would not have carried any relevance beyond the Tory unhinged fringe. The glories of the British Empire, which fuels the dreams of the Brexiteers, were decidedly inglorious for the overwhelming majority of people living inside the United Kingdom.

Its riches didn’t lift many people out of squalor across 18th and 19th-century Britain and which moved Charles Dickens to satirise the government of his day in lines such as this from Oliver Twist: “The great principle of out-of-door relief is to give the paupers what they don’t want; and then they get tired coming.”

You can understand why Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson are so keen on the symbolism of Empire. When the British Empire was at its most powerful so too was the British aristocracy. What is more difficult to understand is why so many people whose families have never been permitted to share in the spoils of Agincourt and Trafalgar and Waterloo are so keen to support the men whose task it is to maintain that arrangement. Just as difficult to comprehend are the assorted commentators and journalists, themselves from non-privileged backgrounds, who participate in this confidence trick in exchange for being permitted to take tea with their masters. They get to touch their hems and to delude themselves that Rees-Mogg and Johnson and May and Davis think of them as equals. They don’t: they despise them. It would be quite funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

Jacob Rees-Mogg often harks back to the days of Empire

This great Lie of Empire fuels equally worthless chatter about Britain’s superiority over other nations. It has disfigured and soiled public discourse and will continue to do so for many years. As the documentaries picking over the entrails of Brexit arrive quickly so will the ugly sentiments that have characterised the Leave side’s campaign. These views seem to comprise little more than “to hell with the rest of the world” and they are degrading. Neil Warnock, the millionaire manager of the English Premier League side Cardiff City – a club with players representing more than a dozen nationalities and owned by a Thai businessman – said this: “I can’t wait to get out of it, if I’m honest. I think we’ll be far better out of the bloody thing, in every aspect: to hell with the rest of the world.”

Variations on this Neanderthal approach are heard regularly. We’re better than them; we don’t need them; we were great when we were alone; we liberated Europe and won the Battle of Britain and they’ve never shown us any gratitude.

Let’s leave aside for the moment that Britain was assisted by the airmen of 16 other countries during the Battle of Britain and that we would have been swamped without America and the sacrifice of 27 million Russians comprising almost 14% of its entire population.

My main fear is that with this abject perversion of history and the convenient reduction of all that is foreign will inevitably come a backlash against them when more factories close and food and medicines become scarce. Some of the forces that have been unleashed in the wake of Brexit make Nigel Farage look like a benign professor of European studies at the University of Mild. Farage is yesterday’s useful idiot; now it’s Tommy Robinson and Sammy Wilson and the DUP. These are the totems – and the winners – of Brexit. Our politics isn’t just broken; it’s sick almost beyond recovery.

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The process by which the countries of the EU are now regarded as our ungrateful and treacherous enemies will be given full rein in the UK’s right-wing press. Further up the food chain the same sentiments will be espoused more elegantly by pro-Brexit Tories.

Scottish politicians have been accustomed to this for the past two years. Men and women representing the SNP, which has been overwhelmingly – and often – returned over the past 12 years as Scotland’s party of Government, have been treated with utter contempt by Theresa May and her government at every stage of the Brexit process. They have simply refused to discuss any aspect of the Scottish Government’s concerns in a meaningful way. It is insulting to all people living and working in Scotland and has left the UK Government looking diminished as a body purporting to seek the best for all of its citizens.

Such is Theresa May’s desperation to cling to high office that she has permitted the UK and her party to be hijacked by deeply unpleasant and sinister political forces. These have always succeeded when hatred of others fills the air. The UK is about to enter a very dark period in its history.