The new Government can restore and revive some of our beloved traditions

‘Modernisers’ ignorant of our history have gradually chipped away at Britain’s customs and institutions

In the days when British people knew their own history, they would hotly debate who was a Cavalier and who a Roundhead. The truth is probably that most of us are a bit of both. We dislike the idea of absolute monarchy on the one hand and puritan dictatorship on the other.

For many, therefore – perhaps for most – the word “restoration” has a good ring – much better than “revolution”. It brings back the old, but somehow improves it. As it says in The Nursery History of England, a book with which I spent many hours as a boy: “In Cromwell’s time people had been dull and sad, but Charles was so lively that he was called the ‘merry’ king.” The exact respects in which the amorous Charles II had proved “lively” were not disclosed to us children, but we had a general feeling that things got happier. The abolition of Christmas was revoked and everyone danced round maypoles once again.

I very much hope that the postbrexit Britain of 2020 and beyond will prove a sort of restoration, with Boris Johnson well cast as the democratic equivalent of the merry monarch. The years in which we failed to enact the 2016 Brexit vote have been dull (though often unpleasantly exciting at the same time) and sad. I would argue that the more than 45 years of our EEC/EU membership have also had a cumulatively depressing effect, making us feel that we are gradually becoming less free to be ourselves and do what we want. Once we become freer, we can become more hopeful.

Some will see such a change as a growth of nationalism, and some will fear it for that reason. Supporters of Brexit would do well not to embrace that word. For historical reasons, “nationalism” tends to be a zero-sumgame word in which the greatness of one country has always to be expressed at the expense of another. Thus Scottish and Irish nationalism, rather than improving love and understanding of their own countries, tend to be cloaks for anti-englishness (or antibritishness). A recrudescent English nationalism could have a similar meanspirited character the other way round. Besides, being British is a bigger thing than a single nationalism. A better way to look at it is to understand more deeply from our own history how we have learnt to do things and why those things have often worked.

Take the development of our own measurements. Weights and measures in this country grew organically out of common usage – feet to express height and length, hands to express the distance from the ground to a horse’s withers. Over the years, law codified them to prevent cheating, but few in Britain thought that all should be made to conform to some universal abstract standard. That continental idea, born of the French Revolution, was metrication. It was imposed, killing off national and local differences, and the attractive names that went with them. Thus, for example, foolscap paper was eventually replaced by dreary old A4.

Our “imperial” measures, because they include so many differences – 16oz in a pound, 14lb in a stone; eight pints to the gallon; 1,760 yards in a mile, etc – were very good for improving schoolchildren’s skills of memory and mental arithmetic. In the Sixties, when there was a mania for uniformity in the name of modernity, the British government, pre-eec entry, began to impose a metrication programme. This was unpopular, and moved slowly, but it was institutionalised and accelerated by our joining the EEC in 1973. From then on, we had to obey European laws and rules: these included metric measurements.

The British public have fought a long rearguard action – holding on to pints, miles, feet, inches, pounds and stones in daily usage, while not much minding metric measurements in industrial and technical applications. As is often the case in revolutionary attempts at standardisation, the supposed modernisation quickly became out of date. In the computer age, it is the work of a nanosecond to convert one measurement into another, hardly impeding normal life at all. (And to those who say that it is absurdly isolating to use measures different from those of foreign countries, it is worth pointing out that the biggest economy in the world, the United States, does exactly that.)

In Brexited Britain, metrication rules should be relaxed, and no one should feel the need to go the extra kilometre for anybody. The BBC can stop imposing style rules on bulletins which force reporters to say things like “a few metres from the border”. Maybe Fahrenheit can creep back, it being so much better to say, “The temperature hit 100”, rather than “37.7 degrees centigrade”.

There is a more general point here about custom and tradition. Custom and tradition are posh words for what people have done and intend to go on doing. When they are jettisoned, nine times out of ten it is not by popular demand, but because of the whim of those who fancy themselves as radical reformers. When, for example, did liturgical modernisation ever start filling churches, as opposed to pleasing bishops?

Absolutely typical was the decision of John Bercow to discard the traditional wig once he became Speaker. He seemed to believe that if the public could see all of him, we would love him more. It turned out that we much preferred the office to its holder. When Mr Bercow’s successor, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, recently announced he would be wigging up, there was almost universal rejoicing.

Similarly, when Tony Blair decided to do away with the Lord Chancellorship, the oldest secular office in the country, he was shocked to find that it actually meant something in the management of Church, monarchy, law and government and the relationship between them. He did not have the power to abolish it. He had to content himself with downgrading the role so that the post could be held by people ignorant of the law. For the first time, the Lord Chancellor was kicked off the Woolsack, and rules of order were introduced in the House of Lords. As a result, because its conventions of courtesy had been broken, it became disorderly and fractious.

When you look back at modernising changes, it is sometimes almost impossible to work out why they happened. To what benefit, under Edward Heath, did we get rid of our traditional counties? Why, under the same baleful influence, did we abolish the assizes, by which judges, visiting provincial towns in great state to hear cases, impressed their populations with the majesty of the law? Why, under Blair, did we get rid of the Royal Yacht, when it was the most prestigious moving object in the armoury of monarchy? There is nothing more dated than pointless change, nothing more cobwebby than Lady Hale’s spider.

I have no idea whether Mr Johnson’s government has given any serious thought to such matters. Most politicos regard these things as irrelevancies. But in fact the rediscovery of our traditions is a creative process, not a merely antiquarian one. In the Gothic revival which produced, among other things, our present Houses of Parliament, we used something old to invent something new. When the West returned to the traditions of the Classical world, everyone called it a renaissance – a rebirth.

By the paradox of history, Britain has the great good fortune to be such an old country that it can be born again.