David Reynolds - Island Stories

In June 1983 the ‘Falklands Factor’ helped her to win a landslide election victory and in 1984–5 she was ready to take on Arthur Scargill and the striking miners in their last-ditch effort – under the slogan ‘jobs, pits and communities’ – to stop what was effectively the closure of their industry. For Thatcher, however, the miners became the centrepiece of her struggle to break up the unprofitable and bureaucratic state monopolies and she treated Scargill as the domestic equivalent of General Galtieri. Notes for a speech to Tory backbenchers in July 1984 read:

Since Office

Enemy without – beaten him

& strong in defence

Enemy within –

Miners’ leaders …

– just as dangerous

Biographer Charles Moore writes that Downing Street staff prepared for the miners’ strike as if it were another war. ‘Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. And once she had vanquished Scargill just like Galtieri, Thatcher won the election of 1987 on the slogan: ‘Britain is Great Again. Don’t Let Labour Wreck It.’[27]

Yet there were limits to Britain’s ‘greatness’. Margaret Thatcher was also the Prime Minister who, having liberated 1,800 British subjects from the Argentine junta, in December 1984 signed over 5.5 million other British subjects in Hong Kong to the rule of China – a communist state to boot. Like Churchill over the Canal Zone, she saw no choice given the realities of power. Under the ‘one nation, two systems’ principle enshrined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, British sovereignty would end in 1997 but Hong Kong was to be a ‘Special Administrative Region’ enjoying ‘a high degree of autonomy’ for another fifty years, with its social and economic system ‘unchanged’ and civil and property rights ‘protected by law’. Even before the handover in 1997, however, these guarantees were called into question by the Chinese government’s brutal repression of the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. And nothing the British government said or did could influence Beijing.

The rhetoric of reversing ‘decline’ by the assertion of willpower has also been at the heart of the Brexit narrative. Take, for instance, the speech delivered by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, a leading Brexiter, who took pride in his nickname ‘the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century’.[28] That, he claimed, was the century in which ‘the seeds of our greatness, sown long before in our distinguished history, sown conceivably by Alfred the Great, began to grow and to flourish in a way that led to our extended period of good fortune and greatness.’ But Rees-Mogg said that he also wanted to be the ‘Honourable Member for the Twenty-First Century’ because this was the century in which the country would ‘regain its independence’ and ‘rediscover the opportunities of a truly global Britain’.

‘How we came to join the European Union is an important part of understanding our Island story,’ Rees-Mogg explained. ‘We won the war and were full of optimism about our place in the World, but then came Suez.’ In his opinion, the debacle of 1956 had a profound and debilitating effect, permanently undermining the nation’s self-confidence. ‘Margaret Thatcher tried to break away from that, but it was such a strong feeling that once she had gone it seeped back again.’ As a result of Suez, ‘the Nation’s view of itself changed and the Establishment, the Elite, decided that its job was to manage decline, that the best they could do was to soften the blow of descending downwards, soften the effect on the Nation of being less successful than it had been in the past, and recognise that we would not be able to keep up with other countries. This led to the notion that it was Europe or bust.’ But that, he argued, was a false contrast because Britain had ended up with both: in Europe and also bust. The country made the mistake of joining flagging, low-growth economies so that the process of ‘managing our decline’ became ‘part of managing the decline of the whole of the European Union by putting a fortress around it’.

So, he asserted, the 2016 referendum was a vote ‘by people who believed in democracy’ and ‘voted to take back control’. And any attempt by those he derided as ‘cave-dwellers’ to keep Britain in the EU – in fact if not name – ‘would be Suez all over again. It would be the most almighty smash to the national psyche that could be imagined … an admission of abject failure … that we were not fit, that we were too craven, that we were too weak to be able to govern ourselves … Although countries across the Globe can govern themselves, poor little Blighty cannot.’ But if, on the other hand, Britain embraced Brexit wholeheartedly, there was ‘a world of opportunity ahead of us’ as we took ‘charge of our own destiny protected by our own laws’ and ‘setting our own direction’ in international affairs rather than ‘hiding behind the skirts of the German Chancellor’.

This, then, was Jacob Rees-Mogg’s take on contemporary history: the ‘brave British people’ asserting themselves against the establishment’s ‘managers of decline’, and scorning the nanny state across the Channel. His fixation with 1956 echoed Thatcher’s ‘Suez syndrome’. His drama of goodies versus baddies paralleled the tone, though not the content, of Labour’s 1945 manifesto. And the elevation of willpower was a feature of all these anti-declinist narratives of betrayal. But the spin on Brexit was all his own.

On the face of it, decline might seem a plausible description of Great Britain’s changing place in the world over the last century or so. In the 1870s, the country possessed more battleships than the rest of the world combined. It directly controlled about a fifth of the earth’s surface, including India, Canada and Australasia. It was the world’s largest economy, accounting for over 20 per cent of global manufacturing output and a similar proportion of global trade. The first industrial nation had become the greatest power the world had ever seen. A century later, however, Britain had lost nearly all its overseas territories; it accounted for a mere 4 per cent of world manufacturing and about 7 per cent of world trade. The first post-industrial nation was struggling to find its post-imperial role.

Membership of the EEC from 1973 was supposed to resolve that identity crisis – the loss of an outmoded global empire would be offset by a new European dynamic. But in the wake of the 2016 referendum, Brexiters claimed that ‘Europe’ had been a blind alley and that leaving the EU in 2019 was the way to reverse national decline and retrieve Britain’s global greatness.

Yet this preoccupation with Britain’s ‘decline’ can mislead. More historically remarkable is the coutry’s rise. That, indeed, had been Gibbon’s thesis in the case of Rome: ‘The rise of a city, which swelled into an empire, may deserve, as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a philosophic mind. But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.’ Similarly, observed a more recent historian, François Crouzet, ‘it is a mistake to think that England’s original supremacy was normal and her decline abnormal.’[29] On the contrary, what really needs explanation is the original ‘supremacy’.

To put it simply, Great Britain stood in the forefront of the great surges of European expansion that shaped the world between 1700 and 1900: commerce and conquest in the eighteenth century, industry and empire in the nineteenth century. All these movements were intertwined with the lucrative Atlantic slave trade – half of all Africans carried into slavery during the eighteenth century were transported on British vessels – and the profits from that trade lubricated Britain’s commercial and industrial revolutions.[30] The country’s principal advantage was a relatively secure island base during what was still the era of seapower. Unlike rivals such as France and Prussia/Germany, who shared land borders with bellicose neighbours, Britain could shelter behind the English Channel what Shakespeare called the country’s ‘moat defensive,’ its ‘water-walled bulwark’. Or, to quote Gladstone in 1870, ‘the wise dispensation of Providence has cut her off by that streak of silver sea … partly from the dangers, absolutely from the temptations, which attend the local neighbourhood of the Continental nations.’[31] Insularity did not guarantee immunity – in 1588, 1804 and 1940 the threat of invasion seemed acute – but it did mean that the British did not require a large standing army of the sort that became normal on the Continent. The Royal Navy, however, was popular and also necessary, not just for direct defence but also because, as an island, increasingly dependent on the import of food and raw materials, Britain needed to protect its seaborne commerce from peacetime privateers and wartime enemies.