Tag: History

Political dream worlds – the case of Daniel Hannan

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams …

WB Yeats was writing about love… but I’m thinking here of shattered political dreams. Dreams of love, yes, they drive our lives, and they are, just occasionally, fulfilled. But they are personal, one to one. And we accept and expect the risk.

But do not transfer the world of dreams to politics. Aspirations, yes. Not dreams.

Why do some people who are trained as historians not act like them? Bring the rigour that history requires to argument? One reason is that they see history as story, they’re story-tellers, conjurers of dream worlds, they fit the realities to the story and they come to believe the story. Another is that they engage in hypotheses, and parade them as fact, without the rigour of peer-review that we get in scientific disciplines. Story and hypotheses can of course inspire each other.

Why would, for example, the arch-Brexiteer and free-trader Daniel Hannan (and Oxford-educated historian) miss the mark by such a margin? Brexit, he wrote on the Conservative Home website back in May, isn’t working out as he thought it would. I remember a piece he wrote in the Daily Telegraph before the referendum vote about how a post-Brexit Britain would look in ten years’ time. He imagined the future – or rather, a future, anticipated it as if truth and certainty were engrained within it, which no trained historian should do. He believed his own imaginings. Hope became a certain future reality.

He fooled himself, and he gave substance to the visions of others.

The past is full of accidents, wrong turnings, expectations which are never realised, impossible to realise, based on dreams and imaginings. We have no choice but to have radical ideas, our world requires it, on the way the world economy functions, disparities of wealth, population growth and movements, the poverty of much of mass-culture, climate change – Christ, yes! – be radical. But pursue change incrementally. Avoid the sudden turnings.

The NHS, which we are busy celebrating, came about and has survived over seventy years, because it was of its time, it was a logical and necessary step. It may seem to us, with our hindsights, like the fulfilment of a dream, but it was anything but.  It came out of the hard necessities of its time.

Brexit and the abuse of history

History is our best and only guide to our future. In the last analysis we rely on evidence (which itself is always open to challenge). Doctrine, dogma, ideology, big ideas – they all escape evidence all too easily.

I thought it time to look at a few examples of the way history is abused by supporters of Brexit. In an attempt to change the way that history is framed. As with scientists and climate change the assumption is that historians are engaged in some kind of conspiracy. The Govean disparaging of expertise opens up the field. Interpretation becomes a free-for-all. Bias is owned lightly, he (and it seems it’s mainly he) who corners the airwaves calls the tune.

It’s insidious. Even the mild-mannered Giles Fraser, one time Canon of St Paul’s, is caught up in it. Reference his review in the current Prospect of Eamon Duffy’s Reformation Divided. There’s the argument that Rome (papal Rome) and Brussels are somehow synonymous.. Fraser refers to Thomas More ‘fighting a rearguard action against a 16th century Brexit. Substitute the Bishop of Rome for the Treaty of Rome and it appears we have been fighting over Brexit for centuries.’

There’s a harsher more vituperative tone to David Starkey, an example of an historian who has sacrificed academic credentials for a new career of opinion and disputation. Starkey unashamedly links the the 16th and 21st centuries. Brexit is our second Reformation, escaping a continental behemoth. Suffice it to say that sovereignty means something radically different today from the 16th century. A restrictive theocratic establishment bears no comparison whatever to a institution dedicated to opening not closing borders.

The German sociologist, Max Weber, whose book on the Protestant work ethic was published in 1905, is also brought into the argument. Turned by some today into an attack on southern and Catholic Europe, seen as having a malign influence on the EU – so we are best out of it. David Starkey for one is no friend of Catholics. And yet – France of course is as close to a secular nation as you can get, and southern Germany is largely Catholic… Italy and Spain have a remarkable industrial record. The old Catholic Church was a heavy restraint – but most of western Europe long ago put aside such restraints.

Then there’s Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s right-hand man, claiming Joseph Chamberlain, social reformer and advocate of economic power based on ‘Greater Britain’, as an inspiration. Chamberlain as a social radical turned Tory was an altogether bigger beast than Theresa May, operating in a radically different political context, and in an age of empire. Timothy’s comparisons are convenient, and spurious.

In a similar vein we have the Anglosphere beloved of Daniel Hannan and Michael Gove, and a good few others – the notion that there is some wide English-speaking identity, tradition and loyalty which can form the basis of future trading patterns, and which has to date been restricted by our trading relations with our near European neighbours. The Empire lives on, and other countries will come somehow to doff their caps to their one-time British overlords. Old loyalties will trump self-interest, overlooking the fact that trade is a brutal game.

For my part, I’m intrigued by these arguments. History is a broad church and thrives on interpretation and counter interpretation. It’s always pushing back boundaries, bringing to bear new research, widening our understanding. And yet – it is a poor guide to our futures. Linking the Reformation, Henry VIII, the Protestant work ethic and European economic dominance is a highly questionable activity.

What we can be quite certain of is that the consequences of Brexit will not be what any of us expect – whether we’re yea or nay sayers.

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There’s also this quote (source Wikipedia) from a 2003 New York Times article in which the historian Niall Ferguson pointed out that data from the OECD seems to confirm that ‘the experience of Western Europe in the past quarter-century offers an unexpected confirmation of the Protestant ethic. To put it bluntly, we are witnessing the decline and fall of the Protestant work ethic in Europe. This represents the stunning triumph of secularisation in Western Europe—the simultaneous decline of both Protestantism and its unique work ethic.’

A highly questionable thesis in the first place. And Western Europe too easily becomes synonymous with the EU, Brexit a brave new world which will see the revival of both the work ethic and our economic prosperity.

And maybe the old British Empire as well…