Ever since the current ice age first began to lose its wintery grip upon the northern lands and despite us being, in the famous words of Nanny McPhee, “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island”, these British Isles have stirred some strange passions in the hearts of our closest neighbours.
We can choose to begin the story anywhere of course, but I shall start with the Celts, those ancient tribespeople of Central Asia, those nomadic adventurers who travelled thousands of miles across the Eurasian plains to rock-up here and announce “Lads (and lasses) we’ve made it. This is it. We’re home!”
We don’t know much about the people they supplanted, their lasting legacy being a type of cup which gave them their ignoble modern name “the Beaker people”. We surmise they were short, swarthy, brown haired and brown-eyed. The Indo-European Celts of course were different, bringing with them the genes for blue eyes, red and blonde hair. Whether defeated in battle, out-competed, or simply assimilated the poor old beaker people didn’t last long once the Celts arrived.
After the Celts, of course, came the Italians, then the Germans, Dutch, and Danes had a go at settling here with varying degrees of success, collectively, however, they pushed the Celts - by now known as Britons - to the edges of the isles, where they mingled with what remained of the pre-celtic bloodlines and have plotted their renaissance ever since.
Then, in 1066, came the French, themselves the descendants of Nor(th)man conquerors. They were the last successful invader. With them came a certain, French ‘Patrician’, way of doing things. Their formal top down approach to rules and ideas of how to impose them, was stuffy compared to the rumbustious English talking - and yes often fighting - shops.
For example the French brought with them the law primogeniture - the take it all primacy of one’s eldest male offspring - a very continental, almost anti-British way of managing inheritance and status. Amongst other things it led to the ‘knightly’ warrior class of lesser sons making their fortune through pillage and adventurism in Europe and beyond. It brought feudalism to this green and pleasant land, which denied the common Briton their ancient rights to land and self-determination, in favour of a top-down suzerainty type of approach. Beginning with the King, thence to his lords - the dukes barons and earls - or Contés/Counts as the French preferred to call them - to the knightly class, dowards to gentleman, merchant, trades-person, peasant, serf and Villain, each person had his God given place and his role, and woe betide any who thought themselves deserving of more than their lot. It was a system in which each man and his wife owed his position, his very life and his fealty to the person above him in the food chain.
Thus the common folk, largely anglo-saxon farmers with a smattering of tradesfolk thrown in, found themselves literally in thrall to their overlords, forced to work the land and share the tithes - all three bags of them: one for the master, one for the Dame (in this case the church) and one for the little boy (themselves) who lived down the lane - come hell or highwater. If the harvest was poor and there wasn’t enough to go around they had a choice, starve or indenture - which is a fancy way of saying go into voluntary slavehood. Of course they didn’t call it slavery, they used the Old French word for the same: serf. As an indentured worker, not only you but your entire family and all the generations which followed were destined to work off the involuntary debts incurred. Allez le French! What a system!! But you see rules were rules, and we didn’t make them. That was God. Don’t like it? Take it up with him! But best not to in this life, because we’ll burn you at the stake (another great continental import) for heresy.
Talking of God, can you see the similarities? Oh Lord, deliver us from evil, protect us, so we might serve you better… It began with the father, thence to the son, thence to the male disciples and so on down the chain. All very far from Jesus’s version of his own theology, or indeed the Celtic kind of christianity. A self-serving religion made in the image of the male overlords who wished to remain overlords.
It is worth noting, if only in passing, that if the Celtic fringes still harbour a grudge against the English to this day, it would seem to be a most unfair one. After all, the common Englisher, to which the majority of modern english people owe their ancestry, suffered under the French tyranny more than any other. The story of the poor and ordinary English person from the 11th century to the end of the second world war was one of oppression, far and away above that experienced by relatively free living Welsh and Scots (though of course this freedom is a relative concept, poverty after all being the ultimate limit on freedom and being ubiquitous the world over since the first people thought to plant crops, keep animals and form settlements.) But anyway all this digression really demonstrates in these identarian times is that who we believe we are, the history we own and all the rest of it, is much more a fact of our present day beholder’s eye, than of any historical truth or relevance.
With the French came a two-tier system of rule. The french speaking ‘aristocrat’ and the English speaking everyone else. This continued through much of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. For example it is a lesser known fact that Richard, Coeur de Lion, King of England, he who was usurped by big bad John of Robin Hood fame, never actually stepped foot on these isles (or perhaps he did once), could not speak a word of English and lived his life (later losing it) plotting and scheming in central France against the French King.
Our language also changed, we now had, along with the English word apple, another word for fruit, in, well, fruit. We had cages, castles and coups. Heroes, heretics and harlots, plenty and proof and property, safety, servants and sewers, villages, villains and victory. We weren’t given fucking, farting or shitting though - they were decidedly ours already!
For a few centuries, barring the odd hundred year war, that was how it remained. But around the middle of the millennium another German invasion occurred, an idea which floated across the channel like a seed on the wind to find a fertile home in England’s dark loam. Protestantism - or Lutheranism - was long a germanic scourge on the teachings of the only true, official Universal (or to steal the Greco-Roman word for the same thing, Catholic) religion of Christ. But those uppity saxons claimed that the pope in his pomp and his circumstance with his princes and priests, far from acting as honest intermediary between the people and their God, was in fact getting in the way, claiming rights akin to God’s. In doing so, Luther claimed, the people were denied a proper and more intimate relationship with their creator.
Luther’s prescription was simple and to the catholic church pure poison. First, he said, and foremost the accusation of sin and the granting of forgiveness could not and must not be the preserve of imperfect men, and certainly should not be granted in return for earthly reward. Instead it was a matter between God and his subjects. Each man and woman was his own priest and they must serve God as they saw fit and not as someone else told them to.
If this wasn’t bad enough, Luther also insisted that the edict that service and prayer must be held in latin was ridiculous, worse it was self-serving, for it meant only the noble classes, for whom latin was part of their curriculum, were able to understand and gain meaning from the words of Jesus and his disciples.
So he and his followers proceeded to translate the bible into German. For this Luther was outlawed and ex-communicated.
His radical idea that poor people ought to know what it was they actually believed in spread northwards to the outer fringes of Europe. In England - perhaps because of the two tier, two-language system which had persisted for centuries - the idea took hold in certain nooks and crannies (though it was never niche, for that of course was all too French.) The bible was printed and circulated in English, and many were tortured and put to the death for doing so. And while it is true that these actions of the church and the state never quite extinguished the subversive idea of a bible for the people, nor despite the burnings at the stake, did the idea completely catch fire either.
Perhaps it never would have, except for a randy, impulsive King (as we shall come to see the Nick Clegg of his day), who was determined to have his gateaux and to eat it. Henry, the eighth of his name, in a fit of mighty pique, excommunicated himself when he decided to divource his spanish queen in preference for an English Anne he wanted to shag. Scratching around for justification he hit upon the idea of protestantism. The Pope claimed he knew God’s will for he was God’s appointed Prince on Earth. But hang on a minute, Henry was an actual King wasn’t he? And he hadn’t been rewarded with that honour by mere chance; he had earned his place by virtue of his divine right. Who was to say the Pope knew what God wanted better than a King?
“No one, My Lord!” agreed the protestants. “You have the right! You should do it! Why shouldn’t you!”
So he did and for good measure he had the protestants appoint him chief priest, the English Pope - and thus it has remained ever since!
This, though, in the eyes of our continental cousins (or at least their overlords) forever schismed England from Europe. It sparked the next wave of invasion, plot and geo-power politics.
For example, in the 12th century Pope Adrian IV had granted the King of England, another Henry, this time the second of his name, suzerainty over Ireland, with it the title Lord of Ireland, and permission to invade and bring it into the greater European fold - in return, of course, for paying the Pope his annual tithe. Though English efforts in this direction were for centuries desultory at best, once the eighth Henry had been excommunicated so, the Papal authorities claimed, did his right to own Ireland. Thus Ireland, for reasons of proximity as much as any, thereafter forever became a political pawn in huge trans-european power plays.
To Spanish and later French regents, Ireland was the perfect, largely Catholic country, in which to foment rebellion and dissent against the English heretics. Since the time of the vikings Ireland was the safe haven to which would-be English usurpers could flee to lick wounds and muster strength. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were aided and abetted in these endeavours by the wealth of Europe’s western monarchies.
To the English regents, it was of course exactly the same coin, just seen from the other side: a seditious sore, seething just off their western coast, an ever-present threat of a pincer between invasion from the south and invasion from the north west. No wonder for much of those centuries the battle ground was in Ireland and not England. Similarly, Scotland was a political piece in the game of thrones, a succession of good catholic monarchs promoted and supported by catholic France to come south and stake claim to succession and thus oust the devil worshipping protestant scourge.
Whatever, the fact is that since those days Europe and the UK have been locked in a struggle, which from the side of the English or at least their overlords, can be described as one of freedom and sovereignty and from the the perspective of our European cousins, one of bringing to heel, bridling, or just generally having some control on the unruly stray to their North.
This internecine warfare had the side-effect that Europeans developed ever more sophisticated means of waging battle. In particular the trans-atlantic arm-wrestling led to the development of naval prowess which far out stretched anything seen before. Certainly the asian kingdoms were totally unprepared for it when the Europeans rocked up on their shores all a-bristle with flags, cannons and ideas of One’s Own God Given Right to Free Trade. Of the naval nations, though, from the defeat of the Spanish Armada on, Britain rose slowly to preeminence.
In the nineteenth century came the great European Empires, Napoleon, the fight for the Americas, for India and the rest of it, the constant battle between kingdoms, by the end of the nineteenth century evolving, as a direct consequence of them, into wars between the first iteration of recognisably modern nation states.
These of course, concluded wickedly and horrifyingly in the first and particularly the second world wars of the twentieth century. Wars which as much by luck (geography, poor decision making, tosses of the coin) as judgement saw Britain twice emerge scarred but victorious.
But of course not everyone saw it like that. While britain celebrated and confirmed what they always had secretly known, the superiority of their tribe (don’t hold it against them, twas ever thus with the victors), the Germans got to work, determined to make amends for their grand errors, whilst the french under De Gaulle in the gallic way his name suggested he would, seethed at the perceived injustice and slights of his treatment by the English while he was leader of the french resistance in London during the second world war.
Churchill complained of him to FDR that “He hates England.” But he didn’t go so far as to remove him as was discussed with FDR because he didn’t want to upset the resistance forces “for the sake of a Frenchman who is a bitter foe of Britain and may well bring civil war upon France.”
When De Gaulle later became President of the new fifth republic he took his revenge by vetoing his accession to the fledgling EU, back then known as the European Economic Community, saying that “England is insular,” and claiming we would never fit in with the European ideal - and how right he was! I can hear you cry all the way from over here in India.
Regardless of De Gaulle’s reservations, we eventually did join and in the decades which followed, for the first time since the Tudors, England (by now the UK) became reconciled to the harness; put to work for the greater good of Europe and (many argue I know) the UK itself.
The issue was of course the one De Gaulle had spotted - perhaps not that the UK was insular, but it was certainly different. Some may disagree, pointing out that none of the individual differences were unique to Britain - I agree with that, but in sum I do think they are particular.
What were those differences? Well for one, of all the European nations the UK hadn’t had a revolution, nor been invaded and defeated. The UKs political system more akin to a coral reef than anything fashioned by design, did not have to be re-built and nor was there opportunity to do so. Our strange system of common law overlaid with ancestral legal rights lasting from that invasion by William in 1066 and altered and adjusted to release the periodic tectonic pressures which built up, had thus, through luck as much as judgement, avoided the eruptions which befell the rest of Europe. It had literally stood the test of time.
But the European system of governance was much more modern, more engineered. It followed the model of constitution, senate and President in a way our anglo-saxon approach had never had much truck with. It was a poor fit for the UK as it was and as it is.
Similarly, as a rich country, the trade off for the UK was different from the majority of other members. What transference of wealth there was, would be from Britain to poorer european countries. There was a trade-off though. These poorer nations, thus enriched, could become our customers, if only we produced the products they wanted to buy and could do so cheaply enough. But we acceded to the European project at a time (and because) of post-war industrial and economic decline. The UK was in no position to take advantage of the opportunities because, unlike Germany or even Italy and France, it had not had everything taken apart only to be rebuilt in a better more efficient way - our vested-interest barnacles had not been scraped from the hull and did not want to be.
Worse, Britain was still kind of basking in the glory of its last hundred years or so of military victories. But it was basking like a seasider in trunks and flip flops on blackpool beach on a sunny October day: they’d convinced themselves it was a lovely, brisk & bracing experience as good as the french riviera, when actually it was just a bit cold; and if you stay too long like that you’ll soon catch a chill.
Britain caught a chill and so joined the EEC and then the common market, but joined like a sickly elderly relative living in faded grandeur, still relatively well off, enough to bestow the occasional favour, throw the odd party, but in decline with no real idea of how, why, or what to do about it.
The third factor working against the UK within the EU was that along with the economic trade-off I spoke about, there was a political one as well. The chance for stronger nations to corale and direct the weaker ones to their own geo-political advantage. In the EU there were now three such nations: the UK, France and Germany. Between them it should have been possible to forge alliance and design joint goals so that Europe became a project of equals just with some a bit more equal than others. Should have been possible but it wasn’t. At least not in any meaningful way, for Britain.
Why not? First, as we said, Britain was different. It’s empire was global and never really had been European. It was not defeated, so felt it had no sins to repent of. It did not have to rebuild and so had not modernised. It was a faded and fading power and not a threat.
Germany, on the other hand, was a threat to France - it had proved it twice in the 20th century. Germany also thought and still to some extent agreed with that assessment. To this powerful extent, their interests were aligned. To prevent the threat of Germany, France and Germany must always ally. But what if they didn’t always agree - and they didn’t? Well here the English gooseberry proved a boon, for each nation could always use the threat of allying with the UK to persuade the other to find compromise.
Of course this is a gross oversimplification. Britain did successfully ally many times with Germany and with France and sometimes with both. Britain won many concessions and shaped a fair amount of EU Law, but did they have the power and influence the Germans and French did? No. Nowhere near. Were they ever likely to? Impossible. The Franco-German axis is the sun at the centre of Europe about which all other nations revolve. The UK was just the largest of its planets, unwittingly trapped in the French-German gravity well and wondering how it had happened and from time to time dreaming of escape.
Or at least the UK’s political fringe dreamed. The rest of us just enjoyed our summer holidays in Spain and France, and if we were middle class we liked the cheap and better imports from cheese to wine to beer and to cars... and we loved the fact we could renovate our homes cheaply, often better, by using hard working Eastern Europeans instead of Surly Little Britainers.
And so, no doubt, it would have continued, were it not for the financial crash of 2008 and the resulting impoverishment of all but the house owning metropolitan middle-classes. Of course they were abetted by Nick Clegg, Danny Alexander et al’s crass decision to prop up and support a Tory Austerity government - here is the connection with Henry the eighths self-serving decision making alluded to earlier. The irony being these dyed in the wool pro-European liberals did more by their actions than any other to facilitate the eventual vote to Leave the EU. Don’t believe me? Imagine for a second they had held their noses and gone into coalition with Gordon Brown’s Keynesian government? Perhaps they wouldn’t have got the ‘differentiation’ from the centre left labour party they’d sought since the days of Kinnock, perhaps the coalition would not have lasted long, but there wouldn’t have been the grinding, relentless chewing up of Britain’s working classes either. And it were these masticating lib-tory politicians which eventually spat out the Leave vote result, and which led to Labour’s lurch to the left, the Lib Dems implosion and eventually the Boris Johnson government. None of it could have happened without Clegg and Alexander’s vainglorious attempt for relevance!
Happen it did though. And now we find ourselves back in the age old dance with our European friends and neighbours. And as we skip the light fantastic, the Europeans, for the most part a collection of silver haired geriatric’s, grasp feebly for our hand, wishing to hold us back, mark our card, insist we dance the proper dances. Yet we, like some senile old granny in her blue rinse, wearing pearls and dreaming we are free, remembering the days of our youth when we dazzled at the debutante’s ball, we swirl and whirl, in some hip-hop, disco, last-night-of-the-proms mash-up monstrosity of a dance, gyrating and thrusting, stumbling and bumbling, pirroueting and arabesquing in a choreography all of our own, laughing and weeping, wishing and hoping our time will come again.
Or maybe that’s wrong. Maybe the granny is a reverse Dorianna Grey. Her portrait locked in a Berlaymont vault forever youthful, just waiting to be released!
Time as they say, will tell.
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