Now that Brexit is almost a year old, and the Free Trade Agreement has become law, the time has finally come for the whole issue to pass from the hands of journalists into those of historians. Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge, has started the process of objective historical analysis with a profoundly thoughtful explanation of how Brexit happened, and why.
The why is much more straightforward than the how. Tracing British geographical development as a series of islands dependent on trade, Tombs shows how Britain has always had an instinctively different attitude towards the rest of the world than that of the largely landbound EU nations such as Poland, Austria, or Hungary.
The English Channel, which defended Britain from invasion far more effectively than any innate military genius of her people, meant that her representative institutions could grow in an uninterrupted way for centuries, unlike those European nations that were occasionally but devastatingly ravaged by war, occupation, genocide and totalitarianism. Britain’s historical development, especially since the Reformation when we broke with Roman Catholicism, pursued a different path from much of the rest of Europe. Not necessarily better or worse, but quantifiably different.
So far, so unobjectionable. But then Tombs moves from “why” to “how”, and here he enters an area as fascinating as it is controversial. As he surveys Britain’s postwar cultural and political landscape, he tries to explain how it was that virtually the entirety of the British Establishment should have supported Remain, while socially and intellectually Leave seemed like a small band of insurrectionists and outsiders on the fringe of politics, albeit, as it turned out, a numerical majority. The question the book poses is not so much why were there so many Remainers occupying all the commanding heights of the British State in the decades before the referendum, but why were there so few Leavers?
Tombs’s facts are undeniable, and supported by impeccable endnotes and citations. BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme featured 366 guests between June and December 2016, for example, of whom 52 per cent were negative about the Leave vote, and 16 per cent positive. Nearly 90 per cent of Britain’s academics supported Remain, which as Tombs states was “strangely monochrome for a group whose stock-in-trade was original thought”. Tombs gives full rein to the Remainer academics such as David Reynolds and Brendan Simms who put forward insightful analyses during the referendum debate, but he also notes that when Sir Noel Malcolm discovered from “rather elusive” official statistics that Britain contributed more in research funding to the EU that it received, Cambridge University declined to publish it.