"It could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum,” Clement Attlee said, “which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism.” In the spring of 1945 Winston Churchill was still prime minister, leading the wartime coalition, and Attlee, the Labour leader, was his deputy. A general election was overdue, after the parliament, elected 10 years earlier, had artificially prolonged its own life. Now Churchill suggested prolonging it still further, and putting this proposal to the electorate in a then-unheard-of referendum. That brisk rebuff from Attlee settled the matter. In the summer, parliament was dissolved, a general election was held, Labour won in a landslide, and Attlee replaced Churchill at No 10. But his words were not forgotten. [...]
Something far deeper is at stake in this week’s vote. A wave of resentment against the elites is sweeping Europe, and in Britain this summer, as John Harris has written, we have seen a working-class revolt. The referendum is a form of displacement activity. It’s about something other – or much more – than what it is supposed to be about.
Those forces, for which Euroscepticism is a wholly inadequate word, range from crude racism and nativist dislike of immigrants, to humble patriotism and yearning for a maybe imaginary lost age. The referendum turns not so much on the national interest as on a national idea. [...]
Today, since the empire has gone, we no longer fight great wars, and we have ceased to be a Protestant country, one might expect the Britons described by Colley and their Britishness to have dwindled away. To some extent this has happened, as the political fracturing of the United Kingdom demonstrates. But Deutsch’s two conditions for constructing the idea of nationhood were amply fulfilled in the 20th century, when two great wars gave the British fresh opportunity to hate their neighbours and to misunderstand their own history.
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