 Impact assessments have anticipated that if the UK leaves the European Union on WTO terms, that there would be massive job losses, shortages in medicine, staffing shortages in the NHS and the social care system, and Kent would probably turn into one giant lorry park. Which might actually be an improvement. But it's not all bad. As far as I'm concerned, it would do the country good to go without for a little while. Make them appreciate what they've had. Four million people in this country are already relying on food banks and it's not been great so far. But I suppose this is just some of that famous Brexit blitz spirit which will kick in and see us through the most complex constitutional process since the Reformation. Things tend to get a bit hairy when someone from Navarra starts talking about the war. But here goes. World War II exerts a powerful force on our collective cultural memory. Piers Morgan can't even go a whole year without having to bring on another guest to braia about how Winston Churchill's handling of the Bengal famine was actually good. It's not a question of historical study, it's borderline hysteria. You should be able to make statements of fact about Churchill's views about beastly Indians, the need to forcibly sterilise 100,000 degenerate Britons and his sloganising of Keep Britain White without being called a thick ginger turd by a daytime TV host. It's why thinking about why valid criticisms of Churchill inspire coronaries in middle-aged men whose closest brush with the western front is a boozy weekend in the Dordogne. It's because our memory of World War II and why we invoke it has very little to do with the struggles of those who lived and died then. It's got much more to do with how we see ourselves now. We can keep thinking of ourselves as a plucky archipelago whose sovereignty has been trampled by mean foreigners rather than confront the fact that Britain has always constructed its political power overseas, first through empire, then through the common wealth and the European economic community. Our supposedly stolen independence is an absolute myth. We gave it up wholeheartedly in the pursuit of geo-economic dominance. And the more that commentators valorise hardship of the kind that they didn't have to live through themselves, the more they naturalise the idea that working-class people have to suffer for the decisions which have been made by elites. There's no hope for Britain if we hold onto the idea that our best years are to be found in the Blitz. A better future means learning our history properly and getting real about World War II.