Churchill era shows we must hang together in adversity

These are very different times. But as then, there’s a hard argument facing us. In 1940 there was a logical case for trying to find a way of dealing with Hitler. A back channel via Mussolini was being prepared. Many serious military minds thought total British defeat was inevitable.

After Dunkirk the mood changed, and people began to understand that there could be no compromise with Nazi Germany — that any peace deal would be more or less the same as surrender. But in 1940 it wasn’t an easy call. We forget this because we know what happened next. By 1941, the pro-peace party was tiny and scattered. Churchill held the country in his hands. In 2017, of course, the Brexit argument seems less obvious. We don’t know what “happened next”. All those projections about economic growth, or the future of the pound, or tax takes after we leave the European Union, are just guesswork.

One side asserts that providing we strike good trade deals and do things differently, this could be the beginning of a great period of British prosperity. It’s guesswork. The other side claims that, losing frictionless access to European markets, we are doomed to spiral downwards. But it’s still guesswork: small numbers of people moving offices since the vote and the slide of the pound are simply not enough evidence. Not yet. Who’s the Churchill today? Who’s the Chamberlain? Nobody knows.

What isn’t guesswork is that a split Conservative Party again believes there are two different roads ahead. Many say: what’s the point in leaving the EU if we carry on as the same kind of country? If we agree to map, copy, paste and mimic Brussels regulations without having a vote… How does that give us a different future?

Hence the real economic logic of Brexit — making Britain less regulated, more open to international capital and closer to, say, Massachusetts than to Belgium. And of course it’s a big risk.

Remainer MPs think it’s just too risky and want to stay close to the EU. This is also the position of the Scottish Nationalists and some Scottish Tories. It’s at the heart of this week’s nightmare for Theresa May: if Northern Ireland was to be allowed to keep close to the single market and customs union, then why not Scotland? Why not London? So the Tory party is as divided as it has ever been, with the Prime Minister uneasily and unhappily trying to hold the ring.

Clearly, things can’t go on like this for much longer. The choice is much less serious than whether or not to wage war; it’s about prosperity, not death. But it’s a big and imminent choice. It isn’t hard to see how it could pull the United Kingdom apart. And, as in Churchill’s day, the Commons is absolutely at the centre of it — with or without the information MPs need.

But the 1940 comparison isn’t all good. It encourages us to admire a drama of sharp choices, painted in wild language — the stark politics of right and wrong, black or white, courage or cowardice.

I think that’s dangerous. If we are going to get through this period, with no idea about what is likely to happen next, we need less shrill self-certainty on both sides.

Remainers must respect the referendum, and not just as a form of words to get them through an interview. And Brexiteers have to learn humility. That single vote didn’t give them an unchallengeable authority to do whatever they like with Britain.

Where the 1940 comparison absolutely holds, however, is that we are, as a people, once again going through the rapids. And somehow, we must, in the end — we absolutely must — hold together. And that is the most solemn job of the Commons. It was back then. It is so still.