Brexit could use some Dunkirk spirit
Of my friends and acquaintances who voted Leave, I can’t think of a single one who thought that getting out of the EU would be plain sailing. When we cast our votes in the referendum we guessed that Brexit would be messy, if not downright unpleasant. Call us crazy (we’ve been called much worse), but we thought it was a price worth paying to have a free country again.
Millions of our fellow citizens, many of whom have never voted for anything in their lives, went to the polling station. Here was a huge opportunity to unshackle ourselves from a corrupt, sclerotic club and show what we could do as a truly global trading nation. Thirteen months later, how’s it working out? The seas are choppy, negotiations blustery, the Cabinet is about as united as a school party of windsurfers in a force nine gale and the bridge of the good ship Brexit appears to be empty.
Squandered national pride is at a low ebb. No amount of cheerful news – unemployment down, highest manufacturing demand since 1988, retail sales up 2.9 per cent, exports up 10 per cent – can dispel the gloomy forecasts from that irritating and embittered clique, the Told You Sos. This week it was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s turn. The Most Rev Justin Welby claimed that the chances of reaching a Brexit deal by 2019 are “infinitesimally small”.
With the Prime Minister away on hols, Chancellor Philip Hammond took the opportunity to start rowing back on pretty much everything Leavers voted for. Meanwhile, Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, said something fudgey about immigration. Freedom of movement, both ministers hinted slyly, might continue until… until when exactly? Until our overcrowded schools, our can’t-cope NHS, our acute housing shortage – all crises caused in part by uncontrolled migration – are in total collapse? Clearly, the Chancellor was hoping that the daily Bombardment of Doom from the Told You Sos would provide covering fire for his treachery and make Brexiteers lose heart. Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hammond, if you think we’re on the run?
I’m quite sure I’m not the only one who is sick of such dank defeatism – a dismaying lack of Dunkirk spirit. Christopher Nolan’s new film, which tells the story of the mass evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from northern France by hundreds of small boats with names like Gracie Fields, is not just an assault on the senses. It takes us to the heart of the national quality that dictionaries variously define as “stoicism and determination in a difficult or dangerous situation” or “the spirit of the British public pulling together to overcome times of adversity.” Far be it from me to question the stoicism and determination of Hammond and Rudd, but if Operation Dynamo, over the course of eight days in 1940, could rescue 338,226 soldiers from beaches under heavy German gunfire, using a fleet of 800 “here’s one I made earlier” boats, then just how long a “transition period” do we need to take back control of our borders and our laws?
On Monday, the French Embassy tweeted: “Today we commemorate #Passchendale100. An opportunity to cherish peace unity and solidarity brought by the EU.” Seriously. And there we were thinking peace was restored to mainland Europe by the bravery and sacrifice of millions of British, Commonwealth and American servicemen. When, all along, it was the EU what won it!
Such denial is not uncommon among European nations which have had to airbrush their own dark, tragically Gracie-fields-less histories.
Occasionally, though, realism does intervene. Leaked emails from French President Emmanuel Macron, made public this week, said that Britain is “too important” a military power to sideline after Brexit. It is, as the French concede, “the British who… remain the most important and the most active country in the field of defence”. That’s not all. At dinner recently, I sat next to one of our spy chiefs. He told me that anti-terrorism forces in Western Europe are almost entirely dependent on the British and the Americans working out of GCHQ.
What have the Told You Sos got to say about that, eh? Doesn’t sound like we have to go crawling, cap in hand, to Michel Barnier, if EU security is so heavily dependent on the UK. Don’t celebrate too soon. Give the Naysaying Nellies a couple of hours and Vince Cable will be on Newsnight warning that we can’t be mean and use intelligence as a bargaining chip. The same Newsnight, by the way, which just asked, “Will Britain’s planes fly after Brexit?” Of course they won’t, silly. We will have reverted to the Stone Age by October 2019 and travel, heavily rationed, will be by horse, coracle or golf buggy.
I used to find such scaremongering funny. As the months go by, and politicians like Hammond and Rudd arrogantly water down the wishes of the people, I’m getting really annoyed. Where’s Boris when you need him? Get up on that poop deck and start tooting your stuff, Johnson: show the rousing leadership that the British people need – and deserve – at this decisive moment. And let’s have less of the Naysaying Nellies, and more politicians like Jacob Rees-mogg. “No compromise on the European Court. They must have nothing to do with British law after we leave the EU.”
And so say all of us. Dunkirk was very nearly an irrecoverable disaster. The forces arrayed against us were terrifying. But the British people pulled together and the tide of history turned. In a famous radio broadcast, JB Priestley, the author, said that little pleasure boats such as Gracie Fields, along with many of her “brave and battered sisters”, didn’t make it home.
“But our great-grandchildren when they learn how we began this war, by snatching victory out of defeat, may also learn how the little holiday steamers made an excursion to hell and came back glorious,” he said.
We are those great-grandchildren. That was the spirit of our country once. It can be again.