A false premise of English greatness is what maintains the great Brexit lie

Many of those countries in Eastern Europe that were once under the rule of Soviet Russia quickly became popular tourist destinations after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This transformation occurred not long after the West and its sophisticated propaganda machinery had for years portrayed them as grim and ugly places and their people as little more than ignorant peasants. Other nations which seemed to labour under the yoke of communism were also uniformly regarded as lumpen and threadbare. As a child I remember Bulgaria seeming to come off particularly badly as a country where no good or godly thing could ever flourish in the shadows cast by their evil and malignant governments.

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Yet, there was Bulgaria on the car radio last week, being revealed as a prize, four-day holiday destination for a lucky listener who seemed delirious beyond words at the prospect. I wondered if, somewhere, in the Czech Republic, a local radio host was also revealing to a joyous listener in Teplice that she and her partner would soon be flying to Manchester on a romantic, wee all-inclusive. The answer would probably be yes, because while Manchester like many of the other great cities of England’s northern regions have been overshadowed by London and the south-east they have lost little of their grandeur.

A sense of national pride exists in the most straitened circumstances; the more adverse the circumstances the deeper and more profound it is felt. As such, it’s been deployed and exploited by governments through the ages in calls to arms against aggressors both real and imagined. In more modern times it’s been whipped up again across Europe and in the US for more malign reasons and against foes which have been largely invented for the purpose.

At these times we witness one of the fundamental deceits of nations who claim to be liberal democracies. Thus, strident appeals to national pride and a starry history are made while new common enemies are identified who are threatening to abduct our “values” and our way of life. The enemies, of course, are even now gathering at the gates and about to begin the process of knocking them down.

The Jewish people – and not just in Germany – were routinely used and caricatured in this way as a means to engender a threatened and insecure people’s sense of national pride. Then, having forbidden them to make any other living, governments turned to them for the financial means to wage wars ... before blaming them for that too. In the UK the Irish and their shady Catholicism fulfilled that role throughout much of the past three centuries. Now it’s other immigrants, especially ones from those countries middle Britain considers to be particularly scrofulous like Romania, Albania and some of the Slavonic peoples. In the US it’s the Mexicans who are deemed to be an army of drug-traffickers and rapists undermining the American way.

Yet, at other times, these same governments will revile any movement which is fuelled by national pride and which might threaten their hegemony. It’s why so much time, effort and money was spent by the Conservative Party and the Labour Party in portraying the benign civic nationalism of the Scottish independence movement as something nasty and insular and likely to provoke ungovernable passions.

Even if you accept that all countries have claimed, at one time or another, to have supplied the true building blocks of civilisation and human progress it’s evident that a handful of countries insist that theirs was the greatest contribution of all. The BBC now routinely runs variations on The Greatest Ever theme. These are often gorgeously constructed productions which showcase BBC programme-making at its best.

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They also all have a common underlying theme: British, or more particularly, English greatness in all of the fields of human endeavour. Churchill is the greatest ever Briton; Alan Turing was revealed as the greatest global icon of the 20th century and England’s World Cup win in 1966 is now simply assumed to be the greatest ever triumph in British sporting history. In this the BBC is simply fulfilling some of the unwritten terms of its continuing rollover contract: to proclaim the greatness of Britain and to advance the belief, at every opportunity, that its greatness is best realised in the Union of the four home nations. It assumes, and expects it to be assumed by its customers, that the values of a narrow-focused type of Englishness are the foundations of this construct.

The BBC is very fond of variations on 'The Greatest Ever' ... and there's a common theme within that

In art and literature English genius overshadows that of each of the other home nations, individually and collectively. Of course, the population of England easily outstrips that of the other home nations combined. Does this explain why, since its inception in 1969, the Booker prize has only once gone to a Scot (James Kelman in 1994); once to a Welsh writer and once to a Northern Irish author and that 25 of the winners have been English? Or that the manners and experiences of the English middle classes feature on the shortlist to a deathly and tedious extent?

What at least mitigates much of this insidious process by which a certain type of English experience suffuses the culture and politics of Britain is that these English feats are each worthy of our admiration for their excellence; not so the Brexit experience which will set the course of the entire UK’s political and cultural path for generations.

An appeal to a narrow interpretation of English greatness – of an old discredited empire and universal suspicion of and assumed superiority over all other nations – fuels and maintains the great Brexit lie. Its architects, having deployed illegal funds and knowingly trafficked falsehoods to achieve success, have now resorted to crude bribes to see it over the line.

I’d like to see Channel Four, still occasionally subversive, run a BBC-type “Greatest Ever” project. In this viewers would be asked to choose a period of history when the UK was at its worst from a shortlist of, say, five.

The inter-war years characterised by the poverty of the masses and the pro-Nazi treachery of aristocrats and royals would surely feature, as would the obscene little wars of empire that built the East India Mafiosi. The brutal suppression of the Gaelic language and culture before and after the Jacobite period would be in there too.

I fancy, though, that the title of “Britain at its Worst” would be this Brexit era when the UK became a pariah state, retreating from the world and beholden to a system of values that Britain fought against when it was at its best.