Remember, remember, all you Remainers

‘Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,” says the rhyme, but we don’t very much. Bonfire night, though still strong in my native Sussex, has gradually given way to Hallowe’en celebrations, many of them imported from America.

Despite being a Hallowe’en baby myself, I don’t feel happy with this change. “Trick, or treat?”: neither is much fun for the person offered the choice. At the weekend, I heard of one neighbour whose doorbell was rung more than 200 times that night.

You will hear people say it is a good thing that a sectarian anti-catholic festival has been replaced by an ecumenical spook-in. In fact, Hallowe’en, which means the eve of All Hallows – or All Saints Day – is more primitively superstitious than Guy Fawkes night.

The Feast of All Saints is nowadays largely disregarded (though it remains a day of obligation in the Catholic calendar), but all the stuff about ghosts and witches on the night before it survives. It is a classic example of how the decline of religion tends to chuck out the deep, interesting bits and leave the silly ones behind.

Besides, almost all the anti-catholic sting has gone out of the Fifth of November. The original point of the commemoration was not so much to oppose Catholicism as a faith but to object to a foreign power – in 1605, the Pope and his proxies – from exercising dominion over this country. The story of Brexit shows how that question remains relevant – more pressing, indeed, than usual.

So the question for Bonfire Night now is “Whom should we burn?” (In effigy, I hasten to add – lest, in this literal-minded age, anyone thinks I am advocating an actual roasting.)

Some might suggest leading figures from Brussels – Jean-claude Juncker (who would surely flambé very quickly), Michel Barnier or the ludicrous Guy Verhofstadt. But this is to miss the point of Guy Fawkes Night. The problem it commemorates is not the potential foreign invader but the sedition among some of the king’s subjects. The “three score barrels of powder below/ Poor old England to overthrow” in the cellars of Parliament were placed there by Englishmen. In the case of Brexit, it is those determined we should stay in the European Union no matter that we voted to leave who most resemble the Gunpowder Plotters.

The difficulty, however, is that these men and women are numerous, whereas the original plotters numbered only 13. Besides, they did not have to creep into Parliament at night to attempt their dastardly deeds: they are actually Members of it, free to blow it up by legislation. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats enter this general election openly proclaiming that, if they win, they will take us back into Brussels control.

Our original entry into the European Economic Community was an act of self-harm by the MPS who voted for it, because it undermined the sovereign Parliament of the British people and therefore the legitimacy of our elected representatives. Much of the modern discontent with MPS can be traced to their decisions in the early 1970s, when they voted, in effect, to retain their perks and privileges without their full responsibilities.

The simplest way to measure which MPS are on the wrong side in the Brexit argument is to count the numbers who voted against the deal which Boris Johnson, defying most predictions, won from the EU last month. These amounted to 299 MPS (with 329 voting for the deal). Obviously 299 effigies are too many to stick on even the greatest Fifth of November bonfires. So the most rational solution is to keep on burning bad old Guy Fawkes as a warning to his successors.

We are currently marking the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I feel we are missing the vast dimensions of that event. It is presented as one of many examples of successful protest movements. Those movements certainly mattered greatly, but what the events of 1989-90 amounted to was bigger: it was the end of the Second World War.

We in the West find this hard to comprehend, because we think we won in 1945. The word “liberation” was commonly used. But the countries of Eastern and central Europe were not liberated: they were simply occupied by another totalitarian power. As the Nazi tyranny ended, the Communist one began.

In Britain and the United States, there has long been a market for dystopian films and books – It

Happened Here, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, The Man in the High Castle

– which imagine our continuing occupation by the Axis powers. In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States, this dystopia was real,

In 1945, no final peace was agreed by the victorious powers. Instead, the Western allies and the Soviet Union established an uneasy truce. The West largely accepted Stalin’s conquests, and developed Nato to stop him grabbing any more.

We were able to return to normal life; those behind the Iron Curtain were not.

So the peaceful defeat of the Soviet Union represented the defeat of an extreme ideology and of a colonial power. It was fitting conclusion to the struggles which had really begun in 1914, and recrudesced horrifyingly in 1939. We won; but then we made the crucial mistake of thinking this was the end of history. Now history comes back to bite us.