Dunkirk spirit? Be careful of what you wish for, Boris...

I was fascinated by Peter Fischer Brown’s suggestion in the Radix blog that there are people in the Brexit camp who believe that a no-deal Brexit the hard way is likely to be as successful and unifying as our national escape from the Dunkirk beaches.

This was, as I said in my book about Dunkirk, during the last Brexit – when they decided their hand had been forced, and that they had to abandon their French allies.

But I wonder whether it might be worth following the parallel a little further.

The miraculous escape of the BEF from the beaches, minus their equipment – and with a little help from Hitler’s controversial stop order, was not in any sense a victory. It was bitter and tragic in terms of loss of life.

It was also the result partly of luck and partly of the extraordinary wildcard administration by Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who made it happen through sheer willpower, the sacrifice and exhaustion of his crews and a brilliantly innovative staff.

Do we have anyone of remotely the same calibre now? If so, they should be appointed immediately.

But the other key point is that the nation remained divided over the war even then, just as we are about Brexit. And, although there were few enough voices raised for staying out of the war – broadly the Brexiteer position at the time – after Dunkirk, those responsible for out humiliating exit were seriously punished by the electorate and the political class emerging below.

So if Boris Johnson and his colleagues – who have not descended to the special part of hell reserved for people who plan to leave without working out how (Donald Tusk) – think they are following in Churchill’s footsteps, they may find they are actually following in Chamberlain’s and those of the much-reviled Guilty Men of Munich.

Yes, Dunkirk was a unifying moment, but it was also a bitter one. And those who were responsible for this national humiliation were soon out on their ear - making way for those who had saved the day which they had so comprehensively lost.

Let me end with Churchill’s comment on Dunkirk that “wars are not won by withdrawals’.

I fear he was right. Even if we do have to withdraw – and I increasingly feel we must now face up to that – people will not easily forgive those who plunged us so blithely into this godawful mess.

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How to find a little common ground? Honesty

A slightly disaffected Liberal writes...

When I was a teenager first interested in politics and determined to choose the odd party out, I put aside my childish idea that the Conservatives were the odd one out because they did not start with L. I began to suspect that the Liberals might be just peculiar enough for me - but what did they stand for?

I used to ask all my older relatives likely to know - I come from a long line of Liberal voters after all - and surprisingly few could answer. But there was one exception: "Don't they stand for 'three acres and a cow' or something?" she said.

I can't emphasise how peculiar this is. That a century or so after the slogan was coined, by Joseph Chamberlain's sidekick Jesse Collings, back in the 1870s, it should be all that they remembered from all the Liberal policies and slogans in a century of elections.

It was certainly a successful slogan, formulated to explain how much land a family would need to support itself - implying a call for land redistribution and new allotments. It did more than imply a commitment to self-determination, which was why it was borrowed by the Americans (they called it forty acres and a mule). It was then appropriated in the UK by a breakaway group from the UK Liberals called the Distributists, led by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton.

I pay tribute to it here because I am reminded how divided the Liberal Democrats are today - despite appearances - and how unlikely we are to remember any of their current slogans and policies in a century's time, when my own great grandchildren are searching as I did in the 1970s.

Why do I fear they are divided, when you get no clauses about this from the party's communications? Partly because  feel so divided myself, and partly because of the very obvious divisions between the party's whig or social democrat wing and its distributist one (I am here using the nomenclature used by academic community who studies such things).

I am divided myself because I am firmly embedded in what remains of this distributist wing, the elements of the party responsible for driving forward the demand for localism and self-determination. Whereas all I see is the social democrat wing clinging to our membership of the European Union, which represents neither localism nor self-determination, and in fact seems to represent clinging onto the outward firms of institutions which badly need reform.

You see my problem? Nor is it just my problem or the Lib Dems' one, I have been wondering about some of my non-Radix friends, after the announcement by Nissan that they will not be building their new model in Sunderland after all - presumably because of Brexit.

I can hear my friends tut-tutting about it even without tuning into Twitter to watch them doing so. I know they are, as I am, suspicious of the influence of big corporations in the UK economy. I know they dream of a far more diverse economy that is a good deal less dependent on trade.

Yes, I don't think anyone would want to make this shift overnight at the end of March - as we seem to be about to do. But I do want to hear some recognition from the Remain side that this is something they had also been hoping for before now.

I mean this honesty simply as a way to tackle some of the bonehanded divisions in UK , whichpolitics are now as intense as they have been at any time since anyone last used the slogan Three Acres and a Cow in anger.

Get a free copy of my medieval Brexit thriller The Remains of the Way on pdf when you sign up for the newsletter of The Real Press. 

Subscribe to this blog on email, send me a message with the word 'subscribe' to dcboyle@gmail.com. See also: www.david-boyle.co.uk. By emailing you are agreeing to your personal details being stored and used to send you our latest blogs. We value your privacy and your personal details will not be shared with third parties. You can find more information in our Privacy Notice (www.therealpress.co.uk/privacy/).