Our history tells us that gradual change is the answer, we should be proud of our history and not be derailed by those who think the history of this country lies in the long gone British Empire. The British Empire is the province of upper class guilt, the guilt of upper class BBC presenters and Journalists, it has nothing to do with us. Our history is about the Civil War and the subsequent steady forging of our modern state.
The first lesson from British history is to keep calm and carry on. Steady and sincere change is infinitely superior to revolution.
The second lesson from history is very simple: people are going off to work, feeding their families, chatting to their friends then, suddenly, there is a war or the government system is entirely changed.
Massive, de-stabilising events happen two or three times a century to most countries.
The third lesson from history is that we survive de-stabilising events by having a National Will and strategic resources. In the UK the National Will was linked to a love of freedom, democracy and the calm progress of our institutions.
Those countries that survive have populations that believe in their country, they are surviving for a reason.
After WWII we taught our children that war was so terrible that international union was the only solution. We would show the way by dismantling ourselves, stripping naked to join our old enemies in the EU. In doing so we would solve the problem of seemingly endless Franco-German wars and so bring peace to the world. There is no precedent for this in history and you can see why, it is worth taking a look at the world:
France and Germany are specks. Our internationalist ambition was the hubris of the victors in 1945, it had no wider reality. The wider world is not ready at all to merge into a faceless, safe, uniformity that rules the planet.
Our best option is to revisit our beliefs. In the UK we believe in the Common Law and Parliamentary Democracy. We believe that our history shows that worthwhile change will happen if we persevere and trust in the good in our fellow citizens.
We must attend to our schools and universities to abolish their focus on the overseas adventures of the UK, these have little to do with our modern state except to warn us that the world is not secure. Anyone can see that the present focus on long past Imperial history rather than British history is a malicious diversion to weaken our National Will. The Empire has gone, you and I are not responsible for the actions of the great grandparents of posh, internationalist BBC presenters and their allies.
The UK and USA, the passing hegemony, are under massive attack at the moment from those who live in the past and still believe that they will rule the world and from enemies with beliefs that are the antithesis of our own. We are culturally closest to Canada, Australia and New Zealand and should see them as the bedrock of alliances for the future.
The world is not going to be governed by perfectly holy internationalist institutions any time soon, if ever. It was just a dream sold to children.
18/8/2020
Postscript: The narrative of the Remain supporters after the EU Referendum was heavily influenced by overseas forces. The "People's Vote" campaign was financed by the European Movement and George Soros and even after the Referendum and two elections confirming it left a large number of Remain supporters alienated from British democracy. Even though the support for leaving the EU had been much higher in the years before the Referendum they reasoned that someone such as the Russians must have brainwashed the population into having views different from their own. They had been prised away from the tolerant British tradition of letting the other side govern. The government needs to devote considerable resources to teaching the principles of democracy anew.
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