One month on from the Brexit vote, and we’re doing fine. The fundamentals are unchanged: a strong economy, a cohesive society and, lest we forget, we haven’t actually left the EU yet.
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| Two sea cadets prepare for the unveiling of the remains of Henry VIII's favourite ship, the Mary Rose, in 2016 CREDIT: JONATHAN BRADY/PA WIRE |
24 JULY 2016 • 10:53PM
TIM STANLEY
Despite this, some people still talk as though Britain detached itself from the Continent and sank into the ocean. They need to relax – open a beer and enjoy the sunshine. History suggests that ruptures in geopolitics can be the start of something beautiful.
Take the 16th-century Reformation. As a Catholic, I am duty-bound to say that Henry VIII’s divorce and the subsequent establishment of the Anglican Church was a disaster. The enormity of its changes – the abolition of the monasteries, sectarian conflict – dwarfs Brexit, implying that leaving the EU just isn’t the big deal that Remainers insist.
But the Reformation does have two characteristics that hold out hope for a brighter future in 2016: continuity and the unleashing of the English imagination.
England didn’t cease to be European after the Reformation, much as it won’t cease to be European after Brexit. Following our break with Rome, we sought allegiances with Protestant powers and played host to Protestant refugees, such as the Huguenots – among them, a distant relative of Nigel Farage. Catholicism did not evaporate. Elements of Catholic theology remained embedded in the Anglican tradition, while popery crept back into the Royal family. Just as the Protestants struggled to rid England of Catholic influence, so the Catholic recusants accepted aspects of the Reformation as vital. Even when Mary I, the most vicious persecutor of Protestants, launched her counter-reformation, she found the only politically feasible way to do it was through Parliament.
England immediately following the Reformation was thus still deeply Catholic, but a new political idea was taking hold – that England should be sovereign in all affairs.
Certain Reformation-era myths about Englishness remain powerful today. One is geographic. The physical separation from Europe defines our identity, concluded many Protestants, while the proximity of Scotland, Wales and Ireland translates into some English right to dominate them – our equivalent of the Americas’ Manifest Destiny. Another fantasy is that the persecution under Mary and the supposed tolerance of Elizabeth’s Anglican settlement confirms that England tilts towards liberty, while Catholic Europe prefers violent tyranny – a view later confirmed in some minds by Napoleon and Hitler.
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| Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the martyr of the English Reformation who reformed the Church for Henry VIII wrote the Book of Common Prayer CREDIT: NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY |
Perhaps most importantly, the Reformation caused us to investigate ourselves. The emergence of English as an evangelical language spawned the most wonderful literature: The Book of Common Prayer, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim’s Progress and the visionary poetry of William Blake.
This is not to say that Brexit is going to spark an English renaissance: the hymns of Charles Wesley can hardly be compared to Mike Read’s Ukip Calypso.
But ruptures prompt nations to rethink who they are and how they govern themselves. And there’s no doubt that the Reformation empowered Parliament. At the height of the British Empire, the Victorians concluded rather arrogantly that they had a duty to spread the march towards democracy and capitalism around the globe.
As regards Europe, they wanted to live peacefully with their neighbours but, ultimately, in “splendid isolation”. The break from Rome was woven into a narrative of Great Britain as a naval power, sailing westwards from the Continent into the sunset.
Brexit contains the seeds of a similar revolution in the English imagination. The Leftist Euroscepticism of Tony Benn sees Brexit as a chance to build a socialist commonwealth. The Rightist tradition of Enoch Powell dreams of a Britain that is smaller and freer – although no one now sees Powell’s grim monoculturalism as a necessary part of that package. Both of these are rooted in Reformation utopianism; both overlook the practical upsides to Brexit. One is that Parliament will once again be sovereign, but the people increasingly want democracy to be more local. To save the Union, we may have to devolve it completely. Federalism is on its way.
But the most obvious benefit to Brexit is that it compels us to look beyond Europe for our markets. I don’t like using history to make predictions, but decoupling from economic alliances has often proved beneficial. When we abandoned the Gold Standard in 1931, everyone predicted disaster – but it actually helped us get out of the Great Depression. When we slipped out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, it felt like the sky had fallen in, but 15 years of astonishing growth followed.
Crucially, the future is only as bleak as we allow it to become. Brexit was a vote to reaffirm British self-governance. We may choose to shrink the state and become a bigger, richer Hong Kong. We may choose to nationalise and build the socialist Jerusalem. What we must not choose is what so many Remainers seem to be willing on: we must not choose to fail.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/24/the-reformation-offers-a-good-lesson-for-brexit/
