Is England heading towards another civil war? If it is, how will it be different from the first one?
It’s very tempting to look at the history of the first English Civil War in the 1640s and make comparisons with the political turmoil in this country today. Some of the same language (such as the ‘proroguing of parliament’) is being used and many of the same questions are being raised: Who has the right to rule? Who should make the rules? Who gets to decide which direction this island heads in?
Some of the same issues are involved. Scotland and Ireland were thorns in Charles’s side too. Conflict with Europe (religious then and political now) is a major feature. The battlefields, north versus south, town versus country, poor over rich, are also very similar. The issue of sovereignty was at the heart of the first civil war and is so again.
It’s tempting to draw parallels but not necessarily very accurate. As much as I would like to see Boris Johnson in a wig (or even without a head), he is not Charles I. However, he is acting like a despot. With Dominic Cummings as his Prince Rupert, he’s riding rough-shod over parliament just like the former king. He divides opinion in exactly the same way. He is as cavalier as any cavalier (especially with the truth). Next to him, the roundheads of the opposition parties seem rather dull and puritanical by comparison.
More importantly, while the causes and the characters are very different, could the outcome be the same? The country is absolutely divided and I doubt if all the king’s horses and king’s men have a hope of putting it together again – at least, not in my lifetime.
In the 1980s, you either liked or loathed Margaret Thatcher; she was a divisive figure too and many people lost their jobs because of her economic policies. There were riots on the streets of Brixton and Toxteth and even more when she introduced the poll tax. Eventually, her own party removed her. And yet, even though her ideology was poisonous to many, it didn’t set one half of the population against the other as firmly as the whole Brexit issue has. People either sympathised with the miners, for instance, or watched silently.
When Thatcher ruled, she led from the front. You knew it was her fault. But Johnson is safely behind the front line using the ‘will of the people’ as an excuse. The repeated use of that phrase and the constant referrals to the ‘outcome of the referendum’ have distanced the politicians from direct accountability. We are blaming each other instead of the people that created this mess – namely the ones that didn’t insist on the same margin to exit Europe as when we voted to remain in it (67% in 1975 versus 51% in 2016).
What will a second civil war look like? Fortunately, there are no private armies to wage war against each other. There won’t be a Sealed Knot society in the future re-enacting the Leave and Remain battles on a grassy playing field. But there will be conflict.
Tens of thousands are already protesting on the streets of London – peacefully at the moment. But if we leave the European Union, there will be shortages of food and medicine and even if they’re only temporary, how patiently will people wait before they get angry and start throwing bricks? How quickly will fuel shortages enrage motorists?
And when the deal with Trump’s administration comes through and we find ourselves swamped in bleached chicken and expensive drugs, to the cost of our native farmers and the NHS, how many people will be cheering then? It’s worth remembering that we’ve never done well in deals with the Americans in the past: they grew rich from our need to defend this island during both world wars and we lost an entire empire as a result.
Even if we don’t leave the European Union on Halloween, if the hopes and dreams of the Remainers come true, what then? There is still a sufficient number of Leavers to make our lives miserable for years to come. Farage will stir his little pot of haters into a fury until they poison our relationship with Europe indefinitely.
The bigotry and racism that was hidden for so long beneath the affable surface of our society won’t go away and it won’t be forgotten by those that have suffered. The intolerance revealed by the 2016 referendum and the subsequent attacks on migrants and people of colour won’t stop and won’t be forgiven. There were race riots under Thatcher and there will probably be more in the near future.
The level of knife-crime, a symptom of our society’s insecurity, is rising and when that insecurity is multiplied by rising prices and increasing poverty, the violence will rise with it. The government, already talking about measures that have never worked in the past, will be become more draconian as they try and assert their waning authority.
Perhaps we should be thinking more in terms of a revolution than a civil war. Like the French revolution, we are facing a period of heavy taxation via the tariffs on imported goods, environmental problems affecting domestic harvests and an unresponsive government. ‘Bread’ will probably be the least of our demands but it isn’t beyond the bounds of imagination to hear our hospitals crying out for drugs or food banks running out of donations.
At best, perhaps both Leave and Remain will set aside their differences as the reality of leaving the European Union sets in. Leave will forgive Remain because they’ll realise the magnitude of their mistake and Remain will forgive Leave because they know they were lied to.
And just to be very optimistic for a moment, perhaps a revolution will lead to a better form of democracy in the future. As the central government loses all credibility, perhaps the nation will break down into smaller and smaller units – each more responsive to local needs – and all our voices will be heard again.
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