Why the Tories cannot come to terms with the end of the last war!

Michael Portillo has fronted a superb documentary for Channel 5 "...What's the matter with the Tories..."

He seeks to try and understand why the UK is still so bedevilled with our apparently damaging obsession with our membership of the EU.

What the programme demonstrates most clearly is the dysfunctional way in which our constitutional democracy is run, and how, most politics, even today, are deeply infected by  the British disease of looking backwards over our shoulders to a mythical and frankly non-representative time when this country was overwhelmingly white, Protestant, when the Church of England represented the Tory Party at prayer; when MPs were mostly middle-aged and older men, when cricket was still played on Sundays in country villages, and there was still honey for tea!

Alright, I may have been guilty of a small degree of hyperbole, but what the programme demonstrates is how generations of Tory politicians have exercised and demonstrated severe anxieties about Europe and the political dimension.

There is a significant degree of chatter about sovereignty and the inalienable rights of Nation States to determine their own policies and financings, but very little, if any debate on the impact and disregard for historical change.

One element was very instructive. Nicholas Soames, Winston Churchill's grandson was interviewed and he was asked why the Tories find it so hard to engage sensibly with the EU. He said; "...The Tory Party has never come to terms with the end of the last war..."

In this one simple observation, Soames, a true blue Tory to his bootstraps, put his finger on the kernel of the conundrum..

This country has always been obsessed with the part we played in defeating Hitler. It is an issue which some people in Parliament, like that pint-sized clown, Mark Francois (whom Soames, to his eternal credit, clearly loathes with a passion), cannot seem to put down, and are forever invoking its memories and image.

Soames believes it has something to do with the psychology of 'standing alone', a kind of 'backs to the wall' meme, and a rejection of any kind of solidarity with other European countries. For myself, I think this conflates with the traditional British dislike of foreigners of whatever kind, their distrust of the French, their lack of respect for the Italians and their fear of the Germans.

What is fascinating is how the most committed members of the EU and some of the earliest members committed to the success of the European construct were those countries, France, Germany and Italy, closely followed by the Benelux countries, which had suffered so much in World War 2.

They had been invaded, colonised, their political models smashed, their legal structures trashed, their people abused and massive volumes of death and destruction visited on them. To re-build, they could begin again with a tabula rasa, and adopt the new and emerging emphasis on trading bloc status.

The focus on integrated trading blocs was designed to reflect the emergence of other supra-national consolidated trading groups elsewhere in the world. The age of the Nation State was over, it finally died in the rubble of 1944, and a new economic and political model of closer cooperation and trading interests was emerging.

The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organisation which aimed to bring about economic integration among its member states. It was created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957  Upon the formation of the European Union (EU) in 1993, the EEC was incorporated and renamed as the European Community (EC). In 2009 the EC's institutions were absorbed into the EU's wider framework and the community ceased to exist.

The Community's initial aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market and customs union, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. In 1993 a complete single market was achieved, known as the internal market, which allowed for the free movement of goods, capital, services, and people within the EEC.

This was a new, and very different way of looking at the world, and because it did not incorporate the United Kingdom, the UK looked upon it with great suspicion. Nevertheless, the British Empire was breaking up, and the Commonwealth no longer looked to Britain for its leading role in their autonomy.

But Britain had not experienced the same degree of invasion, colonisation and destruction as the Europeans and they would not willingly liken themselves to being in the same political position as the Euro countries.

The British national position adopted by all the Little Englanders and right-wing loopies was that we had won the war, and therefore we did not need to change. They forgot, or at least overlooked the fact that despite not having been the political losers of the conflict, our country was ruined. We were financially bereft, and that we existed entirely due to the willingness of the Americans to bail us out financially on a temporary basis while we tried to rebuild our economy which we had mortgaged to defeat Hitler. We also overlooked the fact that without the USA and to an even greater extent, Russia who lost in the region of 26 million people in defeating the Nazis, we would never have emerged victorious.

Effectively, in terms of finance, manpower, and infrastructure, we, the British were the losers in WW2, and we were not even in a similar position to Germany to benefit from the reconstruction process in Europe. I believe that this was very influential in developing an integral and visceral distrust of Germany and therefore an unwillingness to face the new future as an open and committed partner of the new emerging Democratic Republic of the new Germany.

For me, this is one of the biggest influences behind the Little Englander's dislike of anything that hints of European-ism.

All the time we, the Brits, refuse to accept that the times have changed dramatically and that we now live in a new political paradigm where the power-blocs are no longer determined by outdated and irrelevant 19th century concepts such as the Nation State, we will continue to be the sheet anchor on any ability to move forward. It is imperative that we understand this and accept that the political and cooperative model of economic and corporate co-existence in Europe has moved on, and we will never again revert to the models of the post-war era.

We have to learn to get over the outcome of WW2 and stop surrounding ourselves with replications of invasions and reiterations of old battles. There is no need to forget the sacrifices of those who died to protect their country, but those people would find it very hard to recognise the present state of affairs in the UK. My father who fought through both WW2 and Korea was a committed European and believed in the need for us to make common cause with the other European countries.

Those politicians like Mark Francois and the other petty dictators in the House of Commons who so ritually trot out the useless and outmoded memes of nationhood, sovereignty and control freakery (ever noticed how many of them are former military types?) need to start reading some modern history and recognise that our development as a modern outward-looking nation did not come to an end in 1945, but in reality, began to develop a new way of looking at the world.

Our future lies in trade, but trade with our closest neighbours, not with the USA which doesn't give a flying fuck for us or our people. The Americans parrot the trash about 'special relationships' when it suits them, but that is only when they want to invade some hapless country and they want the UK to sacrifice our young people in support of American 'shock and awe' tactics.

A close and meaningful relationship with the EU, the biggest trading bloc in the world, is our real future. Never forget, Napoleon, quoting Voltaire once said; "...God is on the side of the big battalions..."