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Of all the many delusions that have gripped British politics, this is perhaps the most destructive. It's what I call "The Tinkerbell Theory of History" - and it's carrying us down the road to ruin. [THREAD] 1/13
In the Boys' Book of History to which Raab and his ilk subscribe, Britain's glorious past can be traced to a single source. Not geography. Not empire. Not its natural resources or the immigration that birthed the industrial revolution. Just this: sheer pluck & determination. 2/13
Far from being nostalgic for empire, the dominant folk memory of British history is of "plucky little Britain", standing with its backs to the wall in the face of overpowering odds. It's the story of the underdog, hopelessly outnumbered but somehow finding a way through. 3/13
It's the story of Dunkirk: the fishing smacks & pleasure boats that defied the Nazi war machine. It's Sir Francis Drake, singeing the beards of the mighty Spanish Empire. It's the lonely soldier on the coast, undaunted as the skies darken beneath the shadow of the Luftwaffe. 4/13 
Even at the peak of empire, when Britain ruled a quarter of the world's landmass & commanded the seas, it was the heroic defeats that were celebrated: General Gordon, in his last stand at Khartoum; the slaughter at Isandlwana; brave redcoats, alone against overpowering odds. 5/13
In the high days of empire, this was a useful dishonesty. It allowed a military superpower, imposing its might across the globe, to imagine itself as something different: as a brave champion of freedom, engaged in defensive action against forces that willed its destruction. 6/13
In the World Wars, when the possibility of defeat was very real, it galvanised morale. But in so doing, it wiped from popular memory everything that made Britain such a formidable foe to the Nazi empire: its colossal military machine, unmatched economic power & global empire.7/13
This "forgetting" comes at a price: it tells a nation that has lost its empire, its military pre-eminence & its economic supremacy that (to coin a phrase) "Nothing has changed". It reduces geopolitics to faith-healing, in which anything is possible so long as we believe. 8/13
That myth was turbocharged by Margaret Thatcher after the Falklands War, transmuting a victory over a vastly inferior opponent, achieved by a Navy she had wanted to cut, into a moment of national psychological rebirth. 9/13 margaretthatcher.org/document/104989
It's this myth, not empire, that fires the Brexit Right. Hence Johnson's mantra that, for Brexit to succeed, we need only "believe in the British people", recapture "the dynamism of those bearded Victorians" & "put some lead in the collective pencil".10/13 telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/…
It fires Grant Shapps' romantic appeals to recapture the "swashbuckling spirit of the 19th Century", or Theresa May's homilies on "the lesson" of the wartime generation: that "if we come together, there is no limit to what we can achieve". 11/13 blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/10/full-t…
That brings us to Tinkerbell. For Boris Johnson - the Peter Pan of British politics - the Brexit "dream is dying, suffocated by needless self-doubt". But if we all just clap our hands: if we shut our eyes & say "I *do* believe in Brexit! I do! I do!", it can return to life. 12/13
But politics is not a fairy tale and history does not owe us a happy ending. Pluck didn't build the Empire or win the War: it is not a substitute for the power we've lost. We cannot build a better future on fantasies about the past. All we can do is to be wise in time. [ENDS]
