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This is a typically insightful thread from Roland Smith about how the mythology of the 60s and 70s preconfigure many assumptions behind Brexit. But the politics of a slightly later period may loom even larger.
Thread. (1/x)
Thread. (1/x)
Much Brexit analysis (or psychoanalysis) focuses on how people acquired a sense that history took a wrong turn that denied Britain its rightful place in the world, with much written about the loss of empire and WW2, but more recent events get less attention. (2/x)
For a generation of young Conservatives, their image of global politics was defined by the relationship between Thatcher and Reagan, who in their minds seemed to jointly bestride the free world. (3/x)
The world was divided into a simple vision of two competing blocs, with Anglo-American capitalism on one side, and Soviet communism on the other. This view explains gaffes like Jeremy Hunt recently saying Slovenia had been a “Soviet vassal state”. (4/x)
The end of the Cold War was seen as a triumph of their ideology, yet at the same time, many of the assumptions underpinning that world-view were torn asunder, leaving Britain once again a country in search of a role. (5/x)
A reunited Germany slowly emerged as the dominant economic power in Europe (symbolised for the Tories by the humiliation of crashing out of the ERM as the Pound proved unable to maintain its value against the Deutschmark). (6/x)
With enemy of communism vanquished, these conservatives started to imagine a new statist ideological foe emerging: regulation. The regulatory superpower of Brussels became a psychological substitute for the communist empire of Moscow. (7/x)
The great irony is that it was the Single Market, so much championed by Thatcher herself, that transformed the EU into the regulatory superpower from which they now claim we must seek liberation. (8/x)
In “The Making of Modern Britain”, Andrew Marr describes how we are all Thatcher’s children, but the events following the end of the Cold War left a generation of Conservatives feeling that history had denied them their birthright. (9/9)
*preconfigures*
That will teach me for redrafting on the fly.
That will teach me for redrafting on the fly.
