This was in the DFt yesterday and I thought it was very measured.
'“Nothing can save England if she will not save herself,” Winston Churchill told his countrymen on St George’s Day 1933. “If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then indeed our story is told.”
Now that Britain has reclaimed her sovereign independence, our generation has stated boldly that we still have faith in ourselves as a nation, that we believe in our capacity to guide and govern ourselves, and that our story is not yet told.
The word “historic” is bandied about far too often nowadays. Scarcely a day goes by when we aren’t told by some commentator on the television or radio that a parliamentary vote, or a politician’s speech, or even a sports match, was “historic”, whereas in fact they are almost immediately and deservedly forgotten.
This is an exception to that doleful phenomenon, however. January 31 2020 will ring down the ages as genuinely historic: when Britain showed the world that it has regained the indomitable will to live as an independent nation.
After more than 46 years in the European Union, Britain has boldly stepped out on its own, taking a risk, certainly, but then which great historic national action has not involved some element of risk? By stating that no foreign law shall henceforth have jurisdiction over British law, we have thrown away the jurisprudence comfort blanket and become an adult, taking ultimate responsibility for our own choices and actions again.
“Where, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles,” starts the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, “it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world.” By banning appeals to Rome and therefore making King Henry VIII the final arbiter of Britain’s laws, the Act was a key document of the Reformation. Even the Act of Supremacy of 1534 which made Henry the supreme head of the Church of England was not so important when it came to defining us as a self-governing country. Crucially, the word “empire” in that context merely meant a self-governing state, and had nothing to do with the later British Empire that spread across the globe in the following half-millennium.
What happened at 11pm last night was effectively to return to that status quo ante, the situation that existed for the 440 years between the Act in Restraint of Appeals and Britain joining the European Economic Community in 1973. Those Leftists and Remainers who sneeringly allege that the Leave vote of June 2016 was a nostalgic, doomed attempt to return to the days of nineteenth-century British Empire could not be more wrong.
For it was in fact a hopeful, proud attempt to return to the days of the sixteenth-century, Henrician meaning of the word empire, which simply and merely meant a country that governed itself. We are now going back to the days when no foreign power is able to alter or countermand the laws made here, by our Commons and Lords and signed into law by our monarch.
Brexiteers were not necessarily voting to be richer as a result of being free and independent. One of the most oft-repeated tropes of the Remainers was that “No-one voted to be worse off”. Yet in fact Brexiteers knew perfectly well that there was indeed a good chance of being poorer as a result of their brave leap into the pre-1973 constitutional arrangements. Even if one-tenth of the predictions of Project Fear turned out to have been accurate, it would still have a significant monetary cost to them. Yet they voted for independence anyhow, which is itself a magnificent reminder of the sheer courage (and perhaps bloody-mindedness) of the British people.
Winston Churchill’s father Lord Randolph Churchill coined the phrase “Trust the people”, and its truth was reiterated in the European referendum on 23 June 2016, when the British proved once again in their long history – as evidenced by “divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles” – that they can be trusted to do the patriotic thing when given the choice. (It was of course outrageous that the Establishment refused to give them that choice for over four decades between 1975 and 2016).
The dictionary definition of patriotism is to have “zeal for the rights and freedoms of one’s country”, an almost perfect explanation of the motives of those who voted Leave in June 2016, and who looked with increasing astonishment and frustration as almost every single element in the Establishment sought to subvert their will, at least until they were able to make their voices heard at the polls on December 12 last year. Boris Johnson, who sees himself in the same Tory Democracy political tradition as Lord Randolph Churchill, knew that if he trusted the people, all would be well. And it was.
So what can those 440 years as an independent nation teach us about the world to which we finally returned at 11pm last night? John Cabot had already sailed for Newfoundland 36 years before the Act in Restraint of Appeals, and the process that led to British global trading had therefore already started in earnest. We now must similarly look outward as much as possible, actively seeking out new markets beyond the European Union, whether we have trade deals with those places or not – we don’t presently with either China or America, for example, but it doesn’t stop us trading with them.
Nothing will so disprove the Remainers’ lie that Brexit was a Little Englander plot than a growth in our trade with the rest of the world, beyond the hegemony of Brussels. In the unlikely event that we leave the EU trading system with no deal in 11 months’ time, there are further historical parallels from which we can take solace.
Under the Berlin Decree of 1806 and the Milan Decree of 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte announced a total blockade of all British trade with Europe. The policy was entitled “The Continental System” and, under it, all trade with Britain was banned, British ships in European ports were confiscated, and British merchants were arrested as prisoners of war. This was a far worse outcome even than anything Michel Barnier might contemplate after a no-deal Brexit, yet it did not destroy the British economy as Napoleon had intended.
Britain traded and invested all over the world throughout the nine-year operation of the Continental System up until the Battle of Waterloo
Instead, Britain looked to the rest of the world; she invested in and traded with Asia, Africa, the Near East and Latin America throughout the nine-year operation of the Continental System up to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Napoleon might even be thought of as ultimately responsible for the diversifying of British trading outlets, and thus as one of the founders of the next, genuinely imperial, phase of the British Empire. Attempting to impose the Continental System led him into the two wars in the Iberian Peninsula and the Russian Campaign of 1812 that broke his power.
The law of unintended consequences is an iron one in human affairs, and if Ursula von Leyen and Guy Verhofstadt overreach themselves in their keenness to punish Britain for Brexit, and damage the European economies in the process while energising and diversifying Britain’s, it won’t have been the first time that has happened historically.
Mention of Napoleon reminds us of another reason that the Remainers’ trope about Leavers being Little Englanders is so very wide of the mark. Throughout her history, Britain has worked with friends and allies, and this will now become more important for us than at any time since we entered the EEC in 1973. A glance at our ancient capacity for coalition-building, however, should give us confidence.
Countries we defeated are now our allies
Membership of Nato predated our joining the EEC by nearly a quarter of a century, although you might not have recognised that from the dire warnings of isolationism and even World War Three that Project Fear came up with in the referendum campaign. We allied ourselves with the Dutch to defeat the threat to Britain posed by Philip II of Spain in the 1580s, then the Dutch, Germans and Portuguese to defeat Louis IV of France in the War of Spanish Succession, then with the Austrians, Germans, Spanish and Portuguese to defeat Napoleon, then the French, Italians, Americans, Belgians, Romanians, Portuguese and Greeks to defeat Kaiser Wilhelm II in the Great War, and lastly the Free French, Poles, Belgians, Dutch, Americans, Norwegians and many others to defeat Adolf Hitler in the Second World War.
Today every single one of those countries is our ally in Nato. None of that is going to change, further exploding the Remainers’ myth that there are any security implications to the step we are taking. Staying true to the old alliances that were described in “divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles”, and the blood that was shed in the wars mentioned, Britain will be continuing her long historical tradition of maintaining the widest possible coalitions and alliances, while exhibiting no Little Englander tendencies such as the more historically illiterate Remainers suggest.
As we reconnect after today with our 440 years of sovereign independence, the immediate past 46 years of EU membership will seem more and more like a strange and rather sad aberration in our history, a moment when we lost our self-confidence in the early 1970s due to a lack of leadership – Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and Jeremy Thorpe were the three party leaders in 1973, for God’s sake! – along with a sense of losing an empire and not finding a role.
Enoch Powell had a clear vision but had become marginalised
Enoch Powell had a clear vision but had become marginalised Credit: PA
The 1970s were a dreadful time for Britain, with the Irish Troubles, oil prices quadrupling, miners strikes, a three-day week, and rising unemployment. Small wonder that the nation lost a belief in our “capacity to guide and govern”, and instead folded our fate into that of the other countries of the European Economic Community, which at the time few saw had any secret ambition to destroy British legislative autonomy. One of the few who did have that clearness of vision, Enoch Powell, had already marginalised himself politically by his remarks about mass immigration.
When exam questions are set about Brexit in a hundred years from now, enough time will have elapsed for history pupils to see that the 1973-2020 period was a weird moment of doubt and weakness in Britain, not at all indicative of the true nation as she really is. By contrast, they will recognise a proud, successful, self-governing nation state from 1533 to 1973, and then again from 2020 onwards. Even during the Dark Ages of Brussels’ hegemony over Britain from 1973 to 2020, however, there was a short period of pride, resistance and success throughout the whole of the 1980s, proving that the spark of British self-confidence was not dead.
Looking at our future relations with Europe from today onwards, another useful template has been given us by Winston Churchill. In November 1951, the newly re-elected premier told his Cabinet that the British attitude towards economic integration, “resembles that which we adopt about the European Army. We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged with and do not forfeit our insular or Commonwealth character. It is only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we ourselves cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities.”
Boris Johnson, who always politely refers to “our European friends and allies”, whatever they are saying about him and however they are treating him, is in a perfect position to follow Churchill’s policy of helping and dedicating and playing a part, but resolutely doing nothing that subordinates or compromises our hard-won independence. A glorious new phase of British history has just begun.'
Andrew Roberts is the author of ‘Leadership in War’ published by Penguin.