England’s New Brigadoon and its chilling plot won’t vanish into mist

100 years exists in the folklore of several cultures. Lost cities and civilisations have always piqued our imaginations. They offer re-assurance that we have progressed to a more civilised plane, yet also channel a childlike craving for a time when everything seemed purer and more innocent.

Brigadoon, when it was first produced on Broadway in 1947 tapped into post-war America’s thirst for nostalgia. It also channelled a desire, perhaps, to be transported back to a time before the war when everyone seemed happier and people knew their place in the social order.

The Hollywood treatment of Brigadoon began to age almost as soon as it was released and has since become a term of derision for those trying to over-romanticise Scotland’s culture and history.

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In post-Brexit UK, the Johnson administration is now actively seeking to take the legend of Brigadoon and apply it to the culture and government of 21st-century England.

In 2016 some of us, having observed the terminology and discourse of a hard Brexit, began to reflect on what this might presage for England and the rest of the UK. We mocked Jacob Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group as they appealed to the spirit of Agincourt and Trafalgar to fuel feelings of patriotic fervour in Middle England. Surely no-one was buying this, we told each other.

I mean, we knew that at some point down the line the British royal family would be pressed into service to help deliver the message of national unity. In recent years such an arrangement has become a two-way street.

The Queen, despite nearing her 100th year, knows that if she co-operates fully (or as fully as her old bones will permit) then the British establishment – the media, the Government and the judiciary – will close ranks to protect her family from the due consequences of its accumulating malfeasances.

Few of us could have imagined, though, that the project to transport England back to a mythical land of health and wellbeing would have advanced so far. And that England would have become so detached from the civilised world that it now identifies mainly as a Brigadoon version of itself. There’s one crucial and chilling difference though, between England’s Brigadoon and the traditional version of it. This New Brigadoon is here to stay rather than disappear back into the mist after 24 hours.

That large swathes of English society have virtually ceased to exist as a functioning, modern state during this prolonged festival for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee is remarkable enough. That they all seem to think it’s normal to spend tens of millions on street parties – supported by £22 million from the National Lottery – is beyond absurd.

And at a time when the cost of living crisis will tip thousands of hard-working families into poverty, the money being spent on helping a family of multi-millionaire landowners with no discernible talents celebrate their matriarch’s good health and longevity begins to look callous.

The BBC is spending further millions of public money producing a two-week-long version of It’s A Royal Knockout.

Ever-alert to the possibilities for safeguarding his future, Boris Johnson is now proposing a return to imperial measures to co-incide with this weekend’s Platinum Jubilee festivities. A pattern is now beginning to emerge here. Last year English trawlers were cheered by the right-wing press as they engaged with French fishing boats in the Channel in a dispute over post-Brexit fishing licences.

This followed the former foreign secretary Gavin Williamson threatening the Chinese with gunboats. In Northern Ireland a party which thinks the world was created in seven days is resisting the will of the people by using Brexit to collapse its own democratic institutions.

A sitting UK Prime Minister has already been dragged through the courts to prevent him proroguing the authority of Parliament. Now he’s seeking to give lying and corruption protected status at Westminster by changing Westminster’s Ministerial Code.

The most psychotic of ancient Rome’s emperors staged expensive games and festivals for several months at a time to buy popularity with the citizenry. In 21st-century England, a government led by a certified liar and delusional narcissist will squeeze every last unity of political currency from the platinum jubilee and mix it up with substantial measures of fake Brexit patriotism.

As the Johnson administration becomes more desperate a geopolitical stand-off, involving British boots on the ground can’t be far off. Such engagements have figured large in British history whenever a quick injection of reflected prestige is required.

Perhaps, having reverted to a Victorian system of weights and measures, we’ll start seeing press gangs roaming the streets of England’s coastal villages seeking conscripts for the cause.

Those old wooden pillories that now exist as tourist attractions could be pressed into use once more to exert rough justice on local miscreants. I expect that the hanging lobby, which still exists as an influential group in the modern Conservative Party, will soon seek to exploit the new spirit of Brigadoon in England.

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I’m sure we could also conclude a Rwanda-like agreement with the Australian government to revive those ancient transportation laws that served both countries so well throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

Once the right people have been bought off with the usual peerages and knighthoods we could send all our known troublemakers and seditionists to Australia. In England’s New Brigadoon it will remind people of the values that made Britain great. After all, no-one raised much of a fuss about diverting refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda and those who conceived the hostile environment for the Windrush generation haven’t met with any punishment.

I’d also be looking at restoring the East India Company, the ruthless British trading corporation with a private army twice the size of the British Army which rose to become the world’s largest trading enterprise. I’d be having a share issue and soliciting investment from such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson to get it off the ground. It’s about time that England started ruling the waves again.

And surely in the post-Brexit era where we’ll need to be much more ruthless about our crucial mercantile activities we could re-introduce some official privateering on the high seas. I’d be for issuing some letters of marque and having a public auction for those who fancy having a wee punt at the French and Spanish merchant fleets in this post-Brexit frenzy of opportunity.