Britain Post Brexit E-Book

Peter McGarrick

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 278

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

What will happen when the ties are cut? Whatever view you take on Brexit, innovative ideas are needed to thrive. The UK needs to get itself into shape. This book suggests how. We consider radical ideas to reform the voting system, transform the economy via a whole range of initiatives, including a sovereign wealth fund, drastically improve health, welfare and education provision and secure Britain's place in a fast-changing world. Most commentaries criticise what others do. Britain Post Brexit spells out what needs to be done.

Leseprobe

Front cover image © iStockphoto/werbeantrieb

The opinions expressed in the text are those of the author alone, and do not represent the views of the publisher.

First published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Quicklook Books Ltd, 2018

The right of Peter McGarrick to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9030 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1    Challenges

2    Solutions

3    Key Government Functions

4    The Future

Sources and Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

Brexit will move Britain from the shelter of European Union (EU) membership. If the UK is to thrive, it will need to be fighting fit. Written from the standpoint of someone outside the Westminster bubble of MPs, advisers, commentators and hangers-on, this book argues that a huge number of obvious improvements can be made. A fresh look at how politics works and how problems can be tackled is badly needed.

The first part of this book is an analysis of the challenges faced in a rapidly changing world. The second part offers some suggested solutions and ways forward. In the third part we look at how these might be applied to key functions of government. Finally, the last part of the book is a vision of the UK in the years to come. Brexit will have a big impact on this; we consider how.

What is government for?

Someone alone on a genuinely isolated desert island would not need law at all. He would be his own government. Add just one other person and the situation is transformed. Our two people have to find ways of coexisting by developing rules of behaviour. Most of the things that we regard as crimes become possible. Matters not covered by criminal law, such as a contract or marriage, become possible. How are they to decide what rules to follow? What happens if they disagree? Or if a rule is broken?

Our islanders are now grappling with issues of law and governance. It only takes two people to generate the need for this. Consider modern society. The world has billions of people in it, with their own personalities, beliefs, hopes, fears, qualities and faults. Often, they are crowded together in quite small places. This certainly applies to the UK, and in particular England, which, if viewed as a country, is one of the most densely populated in Europe. Given the complexity of the modern world, government is not going to be easy.

Government can be viewed as a system of creating law, in order to deal with the problems facing society. Using the force of law, an administration can be effective in implementing the policies of the government. References to ‘the government’ often embrace the combined functions of law making and administration. In other words, the ‘they’ referred to when people say, ‘they ought to do something about it’.

Government cannot exist in a vacuum. It needs to serve a defined group. There can be different levels of government (with subdivisions by region) but ‘the government’ usually refers to the one running a nation state.

Although they sometimes come and go, as a result of historical forces including conquest, subdivision and merger, nation states provide the stability required for government to work. Successful nations have characteristics that bind them together. Typically, these include some or all of established boundaries, shared culture, shared history, shared language and a general, if hard to define, sense of national belonging. Countries lacking key unifying characteristics tend to be very unstable. Law making and enforcement, and thus government and administration, become difficult.

The world as it is now

Government is about the management of people. There are plenty of them. The world population has more than doubled in the last fifty years and is predicted to grow to 9.6 billion – an increase of over a quarter – by 2050. In the UK the population has grown from 55 million in 1960 to 62 million in 2010, and is expected to be 77 million by 2050 and the largest in Western Europe.

The allocation of available resources to serve the population is a complex matter but, as we will see, one that is widely regarded as something in which governments should be actively involved. The number of people to be catered for is clearly of central importance. The relative lack of attention to this by many governments is therefore striking. Population growth and the associated pressures on resources of all kinds represent some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Where efforts have been made to deal with population growth (notably in the case of China’s long-standing one-child policy), the problems of sheer numbers have been supplanted by issues of demographics. China and, for other reasons, countries like Japan, have rapidly ageing populations. The relationship between the generations has the potential for tension in all societies, but especially those where the proportion of working-age individuals is low.

While population grows, in many ways the modern world continues to shrink. Distance is much less relevant than it was and almost irrelevant to the electronic communication that drives much of the modern economy. Even in relation to the transfer of goods, distance is much less significant than it was. Many high-value items (such as smartphones) are readily transportable by air. Even very bulky materials can be easily moved by sea.

Partly as a result of this effective shrinking, the tectonic plates of the world economy are shifting very rapidly. The West (which includes, rather quirkily, such countries as Japan and Australia) continues to thrive, but is being rapidly caught up by major countries, notably China, with other big ones, like India, following in its wake. Many of the developments are positive, with hundreds of millions lifted out of extreme poverty within a generation. Almost all regions of the world have shown signs of economic progress, including parts of Africa (where population growth remains a major challenge as millions of extra citizens have to be catered for each year). Someone in a hut with a smartphone and solar panel is in a very different position to someone with just a hut. The results of the change are likely to be dramatic.

It is thought that about 90 per cent of the scientists and engineers who have ever lived are alive today. One unsurprising consequence of this is ever-faster technological change. The internet, which provides the information transfer essential to modern life, did not exist a generation or so ago. In almost every field of activity, technological advances are making transformational changes. Their impact on work patterns and people’s way of life is likely to be profound.

War between nation states has not disappeared, even though formal declarations of war have become rare. Conflicts can be initiated by stealth, as happened with the incursions into Ukraine. Divided loyalties among the resident population can be used to grab territory (as happened in the Crimea and, somewhat earlier, part of Georgia). Civil wars are distressingly common and, as in the past, often vicious. Terrorism takes many forms and always seems to be with us. In recent years it has had a notably religious component.

Real pessimists can point to the possibility of world-changing natural disasters. The eruption of the Yosemite National Park in the USA is one of the favourites. An asteroid strike is another one.

And there is always the threat of disease. The Spanish Flu outbreak at the end of the First World War carried away about 100 million people. A modern plague, resistant to all treatments, would kill many more than this, in our interconnected world of routine jet travel. The associated disruption would surely lead to a very different world to today. The world may have had a narrow escape recently when the Ebola outbreak was contained with some difficulty.

There are clearly many things for a responsible government to worry about. Governments are essential. But where should they come from and how, if at all, can they be influenced or replaced?

What is legitimate government?

Government can be imposed on a population. The power of a state’s internal control mechanisms can be so strong that dissent and resistance is effectively repressed, sometimes for generations. There are many past and present examples.

Strong rule from the top, passed down within families from one generation to the next, used to be the rule, not the exception. This was how monarchies operated. Some powerful old-style executive monarchies survive, notably in the Middle East, but hereditary despotism is not confined to them. North Korea takes it to the extreme, regarding its ruling family as semi-divine. Even in some theoretically democratic societies, efforts to keep the succession to power within a family can be successful.

Imposed rule is undesirable because it is dependent on repression and, as a result, is unlikely to be responsive to the needs of the people or the injection of new ideas. The benevolent dictator who uses his power to rule wisely is theoretically possible, but there are no obvious examples. Sadly, Lord Acton’s comment that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is borne out by experience.

Legitimate power springs from the people. Applying this principle to create a good government is far from easy. Some selection system based on the popular will is required – in practice, this requires the use of some sort of voting system. This cannot be perfect. Winston Churchill’s well-known comment, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government apart from all of the others’, hints at the difficulty.

There are all sorts of problems. If an effort is made to link representation to a particular area, it is extremely difficult to subdivide a country so that each vote carries the same weight. The evolution of competing parties is virtually inevitable and the support that they enjoy is likely to be uneven across a country, due to all sorts of factors that make different places different. But, if no effort is made to link elected representatives to an area, there is a strong danger of them becoming remote from those who elected them. Unsatisfactory features of the UK system illustrate how many of the problems occur in practice. We will come to these in the next section of this book.

For a democracy to work well, the voters deciding who they want to represent them need the tools to do a proper job. This requires a good flow of information and imposes a considerable obligation on the media who provide it. There are all sorts of problems here. Genuinely dispassionate coverage of political issues is very hard to find. Even organisations that try to achieve this, such as the BBC, can, consciously or otherwise, create bias via their selection of what news to cover. Many people choose to stay in their comfort zone by reading newspapers and online material that is sympathetic to the views that they already have. Tunnel vision can be the result.

The voting process itself has to be fair and trusted. Unless it is, each government is prone to being undermined by claims that it is not legitimate. Electoral fraud (e.g. ‘vote early and vote often’) is a concern.

Once a government is elected, what then? Is it legitimate for it to do everything that it wants? After all, the public have voted it in. Or is some measure of compromise still needed? If so, what and why? Even an elected government loses legitimacy with the passage of time. Over the years the voting population changes. Events can mean that policies become out of date.

Government is difficult. It can involve attempting to select the least bad of several unattractive alternatives. The opposition, correctly, can then point out the disadvantages of what is decided, and the popularity of the government can decline. Governments wear out, and elections need to occur often enough to refresh, but not so often that they destabilise.

Current political and economic systems

Political approaches

Persuading large numbers of people to turn out and vote for you is not easy. It is usually beyond the abilities of even the most charismatic of individuals. Very occasionally someone, with help from friends, manages to get elected. Martin Bell, the TV journalist, did this some years ago. Such people are curiosities when they get to Parliament, but they are unlikely to wield power.

The ability to form a government is dependent on being able to make laws, which is, in turn, dependent on being able to control Parliament. Under all systems, this means being able to win enough votes within the Parliament. This can only be done by co-operation, which leads to the creation of political parties.

Members of a party are unlikely to completely agree with each other about everything. If they are to work together effectively, some compromises are required. A member who feels she has to compromise too much and too often may eventually conclude that she is in the wrong party.

Parties prominent enough to have a chance of forming a government need to establish a strong public following by devising attractive policies. These can evolve. A party that has just lost an election may decide to change its tune somewhat in the hope of better success next time.

Some glue is needed to hold together a party, and this usually takes the form of some sort of political theory or philosophy. There are plenty of ideas around, so much so that they are badly served by the limited political vocabulary applied to them. This is two-dimensional in a three-dimensional world.

A key distinction (in two-dimensional speak) is between left and right. On the left, towards the extreme, it places communism. A linear progression to the right shades, by degrees, into more dilute forms of ‘socialism’ then to centre-left social democracy (which is more receptive to market mechanisms) until some sort of centre divide is reached. Oddly, almost no parties seem to reside in this notionally precise middle bit. Continuing rightwards, we have views increasingly placing emphasis on producing conditions suitable for wealth creation and less emphasis on welfare and state involvement.

Many commentators put fascism at the far right of the scale. This attracted much support in some countries in the twentieth century, inspired in large measure by the supposed efficiency of Mussolini’s Italy in making the trains run on time. Fascism is an example of repressive government – elections stop and the secret police hunt down those who object. The state is in unchallenged control of events.

It is interesting to compare and contrast fascism with communism. Compared to fascism, theoretical communism has a much more respectable parentage. It derives inspiration from the teachings of Karl Marx in the nineteenth century. Working away in the library of the British Museum and assisted by his wealthy fox-hunting friend Friedrich Engels, Marx sought to explain the development of events, and in particular economics, with reference to mechanistic forces. In essence, there was an inevitable struggle between the bourgeoisies, who were the owners providing capital, and the proletariat (workers), who did the production. Conflict between these very distinct classes would result in the triumph of the workers over ‘capitalism’ (a word that Marx popularised). This would produce a society controlled by the workers, placing emphasis on the communal good, via communism.

Marx has been hugely influential, although not in the way that some of his devotees think. Before Marx the interpretation of the course of history revolved around the actions of kings and princes, generals and admirals, and their associated alliances and battles. After Marx it has become accepted that economic forces drive history. The Roman Empire (and the British, for that matter) sprang from economic power. In the case of the British Empire, this was fuelled by technological advance.

Many are attracted by the apparent purity and coherence of Marxist thought. The brief Communist Manifesto published by Marx and Engels in 1848 is relatively accessible, even today. More determination is required to tackle Marx’s long and impenetrable Das Kapital, which may rank as one of the most spoken of and least read works these days. Nonetheless, notions like ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ have enduring force.

Particularly if explained attractively, communism/socialism has considerable intellectual, moral and emotional appeal. Its principal drawback is that it does not work.

Far more than fascism, communism/socialism was thoroughly road-tested, in different forms and in different countries, in the last century. There is not a single example of it having worked well and it has been discontinued almost everywhere. It still limps on in a few places. Much hope was invested in two of these – Cuba and Venezuela. They are disappointments. The allegation that they are corrupt, poverty-stricken dictatorships is hard to shrug off.

The failure of communism may stem from the fact that pure theory, untempered by pragmatism, does not work well in politics. Communism might work splendidly in a society of angels. It appears to have worked reasonably well in special situations, such as the early kibbutz movement in Israel, where the community involved was small and cohesive. Everywhere else, human nature seems to have polluted the implementation of the ideal.

Communist societies, such as the Soviet Union, came to have many of the features associated with fascism: repression, state control, secret police and the like. It is a matter for arid debate as to whether they were left wing – or, for that matter, whether the Nazi Party was right wing. It was, after all, the ‘National Socialist’ Party.

Whatever the labels, communism and fascism rank as extreme approaches that experience has shown to have produced unsatisfactory outcomes. Most political activity and attention now focuses closer to the centre ground. Clear trends have emerged here, one of which is that the range of matters that government is expected to deal with has relentlessly increased.

For much of the nineteenth century, government was reluctant to get involved with how business operated. Government paid little attention to the relationship between employers and their workers, which, as with so much else, was regarded as a matter for commercial negotiation. Society paid some attention to the poor, but this was mainly regarded as a matter for charity, not government.

This hands-off approach had extreme consequences during the nineteenth-century Irish Potato Famine. Ireland was part of the UK at the time. A million people starved. Two million more were forced to emigrate, usually to the USA, in uncomfortable conditions. Ireland remains affected by the consequences to this day. To modern eyes, the inaction of the British Government, at a time when Britain was the most powerful country on earth, is extraordinary and inexcusable. Such behaviour would now be unthinkable. But, at the time, dealing with the problem was not regarded as a function of government.

Staying, for the time being, within the restrictions of left–right terminology, it can be said that the non-intervention approach to the famine, leaving events entirely to commercial forces, was extremely right wing.

Right-wing politics aims to stimulate the growth of wealth by providing business with ideal conditions in which to thrive. To this end, there is pressure to reduce taxes and a light-touch approach to regulation of all kinds.

Moving to the left side of the spectrum, we see emphasis on intervention in the interests of the public good. We are far removed from the Potato Famine era, and government now provides support in most important areas of life, ranging from birth to death, covering health, education, welfare, transport and much else.

Modern politics, in practice, is concerned with adjusting the tensions between allowing wealth to be created while at the same time devoting resources to service the needs of the voters. Often there is far more consensus than that suggested by campaigning politicians. Changes of government often result in relatively small changes, of course.

Despite this, political debate, especially at key times such as elections, often has a childish, tribal character. Those of a different view to a party spokesperson are demonised, sometimes to the point of name calling. (In 1948, the Labour minister Aneurin Bevan described his Conservative opponents as ‘lower than vermin’, a mere three years after the coalition wartime government had embraced both parties.)

In the course of this unattractive process, we see the limitations of two-dimensional thinking. Antennae twitch away, sensitive to any indication of where an individual fits in the political spectrum. Once they have expressed a view on one thing (education policy, let’s say), the antennae register hard left – or centre right, or whatever. This is supposed to fit individuals into the correct position on the political map. In other words, without further enquiry, assumptions can be made about their views on a range of other topics (health, foreign policy, defence …)

What nonsense this is. We are talking about ideas in a complicated world. The worth, or otherwise, of a given idea should not to be assessed via rigid left–right orientations. What matters is whether it is a good idea or not. It would be extraordinary for any individual to have nothing but bad ideas. Good ones can be found in surprising places sometimes. Their origin ought not to matter.

Economic approaches: the disruption of value

Economic activity revolves around a sense of worth, i.e. what is value? Markets, crucial to economic life, determine this. Values are changing quickly and the effect of this could be profound.

Business involves the creation or management of something of value, with a view to making money by charging the purchaser or user. The value might be in a thing, the right to buy or occupy somewhere, or a service. We are all very familiar with all sorts of examples of these. Much experience of businesses has led to a widespread, if approximate, sense of value for most of them. We know, very roughly, what we are expected to pay for a pint of milk, a filling at the dentist or a night in a hotel.

Value is important to business, but how is it assessed? Recent developments have disturbed some of the traditional sense of value. In the past, most of what people got from a business required a payment. Now, much of what people get is payment-free. This applies to a great deal of what is available online, where Wikipedia and many others provide huge amounts of information on this basis. The internet provides a lot of entertainment for ‘free’, or at negligible apparent cost, in the form of music, moving images, books and games.

Old economic models are breaking down. Once, a leading pop artist could expect to make large sums from the sale of records (later CDs). Some effort is still made to derive equivalent revenue in these days of online music streaming, but it is difficult. Recorded music has become very cheap, or even free. Top artists seek to make money via spectacular concerts instead, as people have to pay to get into those in the traditional way.

Has the corny old saying that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ lost its validity? No. Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies providing ‘free’ services have become huge businesses somehow. So, what is feeding them?

One obvious answer is advertising. The new platforms that they provide contain a lot of it. But there is something else, representing a new store of value. It did not exist in anything like its present form before the internet. It is called data.

Knowledge is power, and data provides a lot of knowledge. Without the public voting for it or having much of a say via other methods, in a very few years there has been an explosion in the collection and analysis of data. More and more institutions, both public and private, know more and more about us.

A modern car is likely to know where it is. This is great if you break down because help should arrive soon, but do you really want your car company to know where you drive to, all the time? Credit cards and other forms of plastic feed more information into the data system. Electronic point-of-sale technology in shops tells them what you buy. You probably file your tax returns online (more data) and your medical records are kept electronically too. CCTV, coupled with face-recognition technology, is very good at helping to catch criminals. It also, of course, captures the movements of everyone else. Modern life is virtually impossible without leaving a huge and growing electronic vapour trail behind us. You add to it with every search online, unless you are one of the savvy individuals who has a privacy setting which works properly.

The vapour trail represents a huge, and new, store of value. What you get online is not really free. You are paying for it by revealing data. This will be used for general marketing purposes (‘people in Newcastle are showing an interest in black and white shirts’) and sales pitches specific to you – this is why, if you do an internet search about the weather in Majorca, you soon get adverts about holidays there.

Disruption to value also takes other forms. Automated production can make goods remarkably cheap. A surprisingly large part of the cost of selling online to the consumer relates to the delivery of an item to the front door. This has to be done by a person and is therefore expensive. The relative cost of services (done by people) has increased considerably in relation to goods. Dinner for four in a restaurant can cost the same as a good TV.

However, businesses still value physical assets. If you are in the steel business, the girders in your warehouse have a value. But often this is not where the main assets of a business lie. This is not just because businesses are increasingly reluctant to tie up money in physical stock. It is because knowledge and ideas trump things, when it comes to value.

‘Intellectual property’ is the right to exploit know-how and things like designs and brands. Only one company can legally make Coca-Cola. Patents protect the creators of something genuinely new for long enough for them to have a realistic chance to exploit it. Patents covering certain pharmaceutical products, for example, can be of great value. This is because they create an effective monopoly (something which can be very controversial in relation to life-saving products).

The disruption of old value structures has had a major impact on how businesses, and thus economies, work. The old model involved a lot of people being employed in tasks of varying complexity, in order to make things. The end products represented a store of value for the business, which would try to make money by selling them.

A great deal of modern business looks very different. Manufacturing can require very few people. Often there is no ‘manufacturing’ at all. The store of value is nothing like a warehouse full of girders. It is a will-o’-the-wisp – the right to exploit intellectual property. If the ‘product’ is something like an app or an ebook it is, in physical terms, really thin air. Retaining and protecting value is becoming much more difficult. You can guard and protect your girders, but preventing someone from stealing your industrial design, perhaps by reverse engineering your product in somewhere like China, is much more difficult.

Unsurprisingly, employment patterns have changed. Far fewer people are engaged in physical production and much employment is now in services. But there are other changes. The crucial importance of the value of ideas, captured via intellectual property rights, puts a premium on the services of their creators. Automation and computerisation do much of the grunt work. People are still needed for certain things (such as delivery) but much of the work specific to humans is relatively mundane.

A polarisation is taking place. At the top of the pile is a small elite of creators, business managers and high-end professionals. At the bottom are the caterers, office cleaners, despatchers and the like. The need for people in the middle, in clerical and middle-management roles, is reducing.

Economic approaches: business structures and ownership

Everything has an owner. Sometimes it is the state. Businesses have owners (including, sometimes, the state). Ownership can take a number of different forms. Often the owner is an individual, whether operating as a one-person business or employing one or more others. Partnership arises when two or more people operate a business in common with a view to making a profit.

Britain, and particularly England, home of the common law, has been very influential in evolving business structures now widely adopted around the world. One of the earliest and most spectacularly successful (not to say rapacious) was the East India Company. Originally formed by royal charter, this evolved, in the course of a colourful and controversial history spanning several centuries, into a highly profitable business with shareholders, many of whom became wealthy as a result. Along the way it did much to build up British imperial power, especially in India.

The East India Company can be viewed as an early example of, and/or the forerunner to, a multinational business. Its operations were so extensive and its geographical reach so broad that it was hard for a national government, even a powerful one like Britain’s, to control it.

The East India Company had a ‘legal personality’. In other words, it was separate from its owners. All limited liability companies share this crucial characteristic. Large or small, they make contracts, pay their taxes and do all sorts of other things independent of their owners. This is very different from the position of sole traders and partnerships. Limited liability companies do what they say on the tin. They limit the liability of the shareholders. The company can go bust but the shareholders only suffer the fact that their shares become worthless.

The attractions of company status mean that almost every large business trades as such, together with many small ones. A huge banking and finance sector (which in itself represents a significant slice of business activity, especially in the UK) has grown up to service the requirements of companies. There is cradle-to-grave attention as serried ranks of often highly paid professionals attend to their creation, nurturing, development and, if need be, sale or termination.

Since so much economic activity is dealt with by companies it is worth looking under the bonnet to see how they work. Like any business, money is needed. This can be provided by the shareholders, who are the owners, or it can be provided by loans, usually from banks. Very often a business gets money from both of these sources.

Someone has to run a company. At least one ‘director’ is needed, although big companies almost always have several of these, often with specialised roles (such as finance, production or marketing). They, plus other managers who are not directors, operate as the mind of the company and control what it does – subject to one thing.

It is the shareholders who own the business and, in theory at least, have the ultimate control over it. This almost never gets them involved, in their capacity as shareholders, in any day-to-day business decisions, or even major ones (‘Shall we close the factory in Huddersfield?’). Nonetheless, shareholder approval is needed for important things, such as decisions to sell the company which they own, issue more shares, and other matters relating to its structure and ownership.

We have identified two groups of people involved in the operation of a company – its owners and those who work for it. But there are others very much involved. They are the customers of the company and members of the public at large (‘society’, if you like). A good economic and political system will create a good relationship between these four groups – owners, workers, customers and members of society. The present arrangements can be improved upon and we will consider how, later in this book.

State ownership of a business removes (or at least replaces) one of these elements (the private owners). We will consider if this works well and whether there are better ways of reflecting the interests of society as a ‘stakeholder’.

Culture, religion, philosophy and morality

A society needs something to hold it together. Physical boundaries alone will not be enough. Without more, tensions between different groups will lead to disintegration, possibly even civil war. The relative stability of nation states allows integration of various kinds to develop. It is needed in order for people to get along well enough for a country to function. There has to be at least some togetherness.

A common language, while not essential, can be a very important connecting factor. Unless members of a society can communicate easily there are likely to be barriers between them. Shared experiences, stemming from the fact that people are living in the same place, subject to the same laws and perhaps external pressures from other countries can help. Nothing tends to unite a country quite so much as an external threat, which can be war, in an extreme case.

History, as past shared experience, can play its part. Even though few people in the UK are old enough to remember life during the Second World War, the country was shaped by the experience of it in a way that still resonates today. Britain is different from France and Germany, partly due to this.