The Conversation (0)
Joe Sommerlad
Jun 24, 2019
Ex-cricketer and professional Yorkshireman Geoffrey Boycott has become the latest Leave voter to make the tired and delusional argument that Britain will prosper in the event of a no-deal Brexit because we won the Second War War.
Speaking on ITV's Good Morning Britain, this latter day Captain Mainwaring said:
We fought two world wars and we came out on top. Why? Because of the spirit and the determination of the British people. We are strong people. We'll survive.
From Brexit Party dragon Ann Widdecombe to members of the Question Time audience and retired miners on Newsnight, the idea that good old fashioned British pluck, a stiff upper lip and that patented Dunkirk spirit of daring-do will see us through the storm has been raised again and again by blindly optimistic Brexiteers, determined to put a brave face on the disaster they've signed us all up for.
One man who is not looking forward to the prospect of a return to rationing, dwindling supplies of medication and the prospect of roasting the last rat over an oil drum in an abandoned Morrisons car park is historian Dan Snow.
Taking to Twitter in January, Snow launched into a superb thread entitled "We need to talk about the Second World War" that deserves to be remembered as the pithy last word on the subject.
He writes:
Britain did indeed fight with extraordinary determination against the Axis Powers.
British civilians and servicemen and women displayed enormous bravery and sacrifice. The human and economic cost was vast.
But Britain did not fight alone.
Going on to outline the vital role the Allies played in the collective fightback against Nazi Germany, Snow stresses the importance of British support from the Commonwealth even before the superpower might of America and the Soviet Union joined the fray.
The writer and presenter argues the assault on Adolf Hitler's imperial ambitions was always a collaborative, multilateral effort.
Snow reminds his followers that prime minister Sir Winston Churchill discussed strategy throughout with US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin and often failed to get his own way, citing pragmatic compromises made at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences of 1943 and 1945.
Snow concludes the lesson with a reminder of a particularly devastating British defeat from history that makes a nonsense of patriotic tub-thumping about our innate superiority.
Britain has fought in A LOT of coalitions. They are expensive, frustrating & often inefficient but we're ultimately victorious.
Britain has lost only one great power war in the last 250yrs. The American Revolutionary War, when, funnily enough, Britain was fighting alone.
The heroism and selfless sacrifice of the "Greatest Generation" is not in dispute here, but conservative Britain's romantic insistence that the events of 1939 to 1945 represent some exceptional triumph of the national character is tiresome in the extreme.
Those men and women who served did so because they had little choice but to fight for a better world without fear and tyranny and not to pave the way for a future of petty isolationism, bloody-minded division and rampant bigotry.
The British may indeed have wells of stoic reserve to draw upon but are they really any deeper than those of other nations? And, even if they are, does that really make it any more desirable that we should have to make use of them?
Rather than hearts swelling with pride at the very idea of Dame Vera Lynn singing 'The White Cliffs of Dover', wouldn't we all be better off with thriving international trade, prosperity and friendly relations with our neighours across the Channel?