 Was Brexit the longing for a national idea of Britain, a surprisingly modern creation, rather than an expression of imperial nostalgia? And as we look forward to January 2021, what kind of a Brexit might we begin to expect? Dominic Cummings may be gone, after all, but the big interventions like a touted National Investment Bank and a National Technology and Innovation Agency remain. Joining me to discuss that today is Professor David David wrote the widely acclaimed The Rise and Fall of the British Nation at 20th Century History, first published by Penguin in 2018, and has written a number of other excellent histories on late 19th and 20th century Britain, with a general focus on the relationship between technology, science and war-making. He's the hands-rousing Professor of the History of Science and Technology and Professor of Mon History at King's College London, and has written a number of excellent articles relevant to today's discussion for the Guardian newspaper. Professor David Edgerton, welcome to Navarro Media. Thank you very much. You recently wrote in The Guardian, and I'm going to quote you here, that people voted for Brexit not because they were imperialists, but because they were nostalgic for a national Britain. They were certainly not voting for the return to free immigration from the old imperial territories. The history that seems to matter most to Brexiteers is a particular account of the Second World War, one that is decidedly nationalist. Now, can you unpack that statement and its relationship to your thinking more generally? I mean, it really kind of instantiates, I think, a lot of your recent work, your work, you can go back a bit further. Most people generally think the opposite is true. The decision to leave the European Union was very much a hangover from Britain's imperial past. You think the opposite, your odds with received opinion. Why is that? Yes, I mean, you're right. The received opinion is not only that Brexit was an imperialist throwback, but the British reluctance to go into the EEC in the 60s and 70s was also an imperialist throwback. The problem is that the supposedly imperialist British government, conservative government, decided to seek admission in 1961. The empire was barely dead in 1961. In 1975, the supposedly imperialist British people voted by two-thirds to one-thirds to remain in the EEC. So the argument has to be that the British electorate has got more imperialist, not only since 1961, but since 1975 as well. It's on the face of it a rather odd argument. So where does it come from? Well, it comes from a very, very long left and centre-left tradition of making precisely that argument, that the UK is anti-European because it's imperialist. I think that argument is just historically wrong. So the question then becomes, why is it that people voted for Brexit? And I think, actually, by the way, we need to distinguish between the arguments of the Brexiteers and the reasons people voted for Brexit, because I don't think it was the same thing at all. I think the fundamental ideological drive behind Brexit has been a radical free market argument, whereas the quotation we've read out indicates, my view, is that people voted for Brexit on nationalist grounds and part of the ethnic grounds. So what I'm saying is that in the late 60s and 70s, the UK was national rather than imperialist. It's thrown off the empire. One way in which that was expressed was the desire of the elite to go into the EEC, but another was, and this is strong on the left, that the nation should develop itself even more through national economic and industrial strategy. Where does the Second World War come into this? Well, it's precisely in the 60s and 70s that you get a very nationalistic account of the Second World War. So this is the moment where historians and others say Britain stood alone in 1940, that Britain was the most mobilized nation for the Second World War, that it turned inward and succeeded as a result of doing exactly that. During the war itself, the picture was very different. The imperial nature of the war was highlighted. Britain, something called Britain or the United Kingdom couldn't possibly be alone in British propaganda because the United Kingdom was part of this massive empire. In any case, the main thrust of propaganda was that the United Kingdom and the empire had allies from the beginning of the war right through to the end. So I think the imperial case just falls apart for chronological reasons. The national case reflects the politics of the 1960s and 70s, to which we need to add a very crucial point that's often ignored, and that is that the Brexit vote was an old vote, just like the Conservative Party vote now is an old vote. So people who voted for Brexit, typically people who became adults in the 60s and 70s rather than in the more recent past, but all the same. There is a process of changing people's minds, which is fundamental to Brexit. The bigger point I make is that Brexit's got very little to do with actual British history. It's a product of the here and now. We've got to explain why the young people of 1975 voted to remain, and those very same people in 2016 voted to leave. And just for our audience, I mean, this is something that I think is lost on many, many people. Queen Elizabeth II is the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and various crown territories and so on. But her predecessors are King and Queen's Emperor. So that's quite a big transition. So the polity of Britain, as I understand it, and your other but the rise and fall of the British state, for instance, really emerges from the Second World War. So this idea that Britain should turn away from Europe, it seems to me, is almost immersed in the idea of being a left-wing developmental state. Now clearly that's not the intention of many, many people arguing and demanding for Brexit in 2016. But that seems to be the primary origin story. I mean, I'm just repeating what you've said there. But I think for a left-wing audience, that's probably going to be quite counter-intuitive. Is that a fair assessment of your analysis? Yes, because the left story, and we see it in Eric Hobswarm, we see it in the work of Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, and very widely diffused across left intellectual circles is the United Kingdom remains essentially Edwardian, imperialist and Edwardian to the present day. And that explains the nature of British state, quote, imperial state. It explains British relative decline. It explains the nature of the British elite. So it's a deep continuity thesis. And I want to argue against that, to say there was a radical change actually in 1945, not in 1940. You're right to point to the monarchy. The British monarchs ruled over entire empires. But Queen Elizabeth was Queen of the United Kingdom, a Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and separately Queen of Canada, Australia, St Lucia, and so on. And actually, Enoch Powell noted this change in what called the royal titles and objected vehemently to this, because he was right. It was a very important change in the status of the British monarchy, which actually goes along with a very important change in the status of British nationality, which effectively is created in 1948, just as Canadian nationality is created around that time. So in my argument, the United Kingdom is a new nation in the same way that Canada, Australia, Ireland earlier, and India are new nations that come out of the British Empire. And all of them have varying degrees, anti-imperial ideologies. That idea that the possibility of a British national, it doesn't really exist before the late 1940s. I mean, that's a bit of a kind of galaxy brain moment, probably for quite a few people. Can you explain specifically what you mean by that? So how would an elite British person think of themselves before 1945? Well, they think of themselves as owing allegiance to something called the Empire. They might also be English, or Scottish, or Welsh, or Irish. Especially if they were conservatives, they would insist on the need to develop the Empire rather than the nation as an economic unit. They would think of the British armed forces as imperial. And for example, after the end of the First World War, when of course British losses were tabulated, they were imperial losses, not the United Kingdom national losses. So Empire was everywhere in elite thinking the monarchy, as I said, Minsko was an imperial, not a national monarchy. Westminster was an imperial parliament. That sometimes had a different sense, but that was often described as that. It is a rather odd thing that there isn't a national sense of the sort that we have later. When people talked about the British Empire, one needs to point out, they don't mean something that's out there overseas. The United Kingdom was a central part of the Empire. So when people talked about the Committee of Imperial Defence, which is kind of like a Ministry of Defence, they didn't mean some committee that was concerned with the defence of India. They meant the committee that was centrally concerned with the defence of the United Kingdom and indeed the whole Empire. The Imperial War Museum would be another example. It's a museum for the whole Empire focused on the largest parts of that Empire, economically at least, the United Kingdom. And on it goes. You said earlier on that Britain didn't fight the Second World War alone. That's obvious. There obviously isn't just the rest of the Empire, but there are a number of governments in exile and partisans and so on from 1940 onwards. But can you explain the role of the Empire in Britain's capacity to continue to make war after 1940, just in terms of the dependence it had on imports of food, of later on manufactured weapons, of energy supplies and so on? Could Britain have stayed in the war after 1940 if it didn't have an Empire? The answer is yes, it could have been fighting only in Europe. It's important to remember that the Empire contains very different kinds of areas and economically important bits were the so-called white dominions that exported food largely to the UK. India was by far the most important in terms of population and was crucially important in terms of projecting power in the East. Indian troops were vital in their importance. But the UK could continue to fight on in Europe, its supplies from South America, from the white dominions and the United States and the rest of the Empire for Africa and Asia. Of course, the Far East Empire was lost to the Japanese quite easily. I mean, generally there is a supposition that the Empire was fundamental to the British economy from the late 19th century onwards. I think it's important to note that that story is overdone. The bit that really mattered was the white dominions, so-called, in imperial trade. But trade with so-called foreign countries is more important than trade with British countries. With the exception of the period after 1945, actually, that's the most imperial moment in British history is the late 40s through to the late 50s, early 60s, something like that. Sorry, go on. I was saying we've just grown very used to the idea that Empire was central. This is what the Empire is wanted, but they never achieved it. The idea that Britain could be self-sufficient in food. I mean, you talk about, for instance, the rise and fall of the British nation, the numbers are extraordinary though in terms of Britain's dependence on imports of food from all throughout the late 19th century, all the way through the early 20th century. And it does feel like you say that the origin myth of Brexit is this idea of national self-sufficiency and developmentalism. When it comes to food, for instance, it seems to me that that moment has barely ever existed, even during the darkest hours of the early 1940s. Is that correct? Yes, it certainly didn't exist in 1940-41. The United Kingdom remained deeply dependent on overseas supplies of food. And to be sure, more food was grown during the war than before it. But imports of cheese, imports of food, imports of meat, I should say, actually went up during the war. The idea that the UK was cut off from the world is simply false. In fact, the total value of imports into the UK increased during the war compared to the 1930s. But British historians have wanted to present a picture of the war as this national moment of turning inwards and finding inner resources to succeed. And that's why it became such a powerful myth for a certain kind of Brexit argument that Britain succeeded on its own, having been thrown out of the European continent. In fact, it only succeeded after being thrown out of the European continent because the United States stepped in to supply the food, the raw materials, and other things that had previously come from continental Europe. The rupture from Europe in 1940 was a very profound one, which we don't notice, not because the country turned inward, but because it turned to the United States. Sorry, I was going to say you might not agree with this assessment, but there is the argument that says, effectively, the Allies that start the war are two imperial powers, Britain and France, the two sort of Allied powers that end the war, these two gigantic superpowers, which are in no real way connected to the 19th century vision of European colonialism, the United States and the USSR. So it turns out that 1940 is actually that rupture, as you sort of say, between the old world and the new. Is that again, is that a correct assessment here? Well, I don't think it's 1940. Actually, it's really 1942. That's when the Empire was defeated in the East. I think that's the really big moment. You're absolutely right. Yes, exactly. But you're absolutely right to point to the massive, massive, massive relative decline of the United Kingdom and indeed the British Empire in the years between 1940 and 1945, 39 and 45. Again, it's something which speaks against the Brexite analysis. I mean, they take these years to be years of rebirth. But in fact, they're years of disaster for British global power. I mean, the most disastrous years of British global power in the 20th century was not Suez. It's the second module. I wouldn't stick to this idea of the Empire and actually strength, this is a strange question probably for some of our audience, but it's relationship to race. And again, you articulate quite counterintuitive point, but I think you do in a very compelling manner. This is from a different article in The Guardian. And I'm going to quote you here, Blaming Empire is a deep seated reflex that feels reassuringly progressive, but it's also been a way to avoid confronting things that lie a little closer to home. It has long been easier and less morally and intellectually contentious to castigate the actions of the British state and elite in faraway colonies than confront their actions at home far too many ills of past and present are lazily laid at this door. So again, the default has generally been the ultra nationalist politics in this country, including Brexit, was connected to the idea of racial superiority, homogeneity, and also the country's imperial past. Do you think that's overstated actually? Yes. I mean, I think one needs to distinguish between nationalism and imperialism. And in the British discourse, the two things are the same. In fact, imperialism is taken to be that the highest form of nationalism. But you have great difficulty then explaining somebody like Paul, who decisively rejects imperialism, sees it as a blip in British history. His overt racism is a nationalist, not an imperial racism. And why should we be surprised at that? Racism is to be found in places that didn't have large overseas empires. It's pretty universal. And at the official level, British imperialism was anti-racist. I mean, the idea was that the empire was non-racial, that it was about developing the colonies. It was about leading people to independence and was radically different, for example, from Nazi Germany, which was racist. Yeah, I think... I thought you'd taken a piece value, but the point is, ideologically, empire is not to be equated in any straightforward way with racism. And the point is that it's not just the issue of racism, which is explained by imperialism. All sorts of other things are explained by imperialism by the British centre and the British left. As I was saying earlier, the nature of the British elite, the nature of the city, which supposedly stops national economic development taking place. Therefore, the whole British economic decline is due to empire. The structure of the constitution is... It's like on a Nair Nandeson. It's Nair Nandeson, but it's much, much broader than that. I mean, it goes way back to Hobson before the First World War. It's the default position of the British left. And to give you another example, British militarism doesn't have a domestic origin, in all these arguments, is the part of imperialism. It's something I'm alien to the nation, which corrupts the nation, in this case, into being militaristic. And there's another version of that, which is the United States that corrupts the innocent, post-war British elites into being imperialists. My argument is that the British elite has been military in some particular ways for its own reasons. And it's interesting that historians of Britain have not wanted to see that. The left does not want you to see that. It recognises a US military industrial complex, but it doesn't recognise a British military industrial complex. It only sees waste arising from over-investment in the military. Sorry, I was going to say there's an analogue... Again, because I agree with you, very few on the left would think this, but there's an analogue, if you look at, for instance, the Ottoman Empire and then subsequent Turkish nationalism. Ottoman imperialism certainly seems much more multicultural, inclusive, much more Pacific than Turkish nationalism, as we're now seeing. And you talk to any Kurd or Armenian, and that's the first thing they would say. Again, is that a relatively fair sort of observation? Well, yes, I mean, empires are by definition multinational, and if they're going to work, they've got to have some measure, at least of mutual respect between the different communities within the empire. So yes, and we know, don't we, that one of the things that destroyed the Ottoman Empire was precisely the attempt to Ottomanise the whole thing, just as the Russian Empire was partly doomed by an effort to diversification. Let's turn to Brexit, because I think you've said some incredibly original things, actually, when it comes to Brexit. Let me rephrase that. I think people intuitively would agree with you, but I think the reasons you're giving as to why certain outcomes are likely, i.e., a relatively directionless sort of vision on industrial policy, I think you flesh it out really well. So you wrote last year, the state as in the British state can no longer undertake the radical planning and intervention that might make Brexit work. Why do you think that's the case? Why? Because there's a systematic loss of expertise, and partly because of transfer to the EU in the case of trade, but more generally a lack of interest in developing the skills to intervene in the economy and society and to change things. There's been increased dependence on management consultants on outsourcing generally. The political class, I think, has become intellectually weaker over time and isn't able to think about these issues. And look where we are. Covid, the state has had great difficulty in coming up with policies there. It is basically kind of throwing money at essentially PR in the case of what's called NHS test and trace, and in fact it's just a delight and circle and sit-out test without trace, and most importantly without isolate. In the case of Brexit, the state clearly wasn't ready to negotiate trade deals. All we have are some partial rollovers of EU trade deals. We are facing in just a few weeks the end of the transition period, and it's pretty clear that despite claims to the contrary, the British state is not faced up to the realities of what the end of transition period means, and is therefore not being able to either make plans or communicate them to the business community, to the hoardage community, and so on. So you have the single most important policy of the British state, the policy which has elected the present government and it hasn't been thought through. That's astonishing, and yet that is the reality that we are facing. I don't think this has ever happened before. You don't think this has ever happened before? Is there another analogue with another major power doing this, or do you think it's really unprecedented? I think it's unprecedented, and of course I mean governments have to change direction through war or emergency, but this is a policy decided on by the electorate, one of the two main British political parties becomes the party whose main purpose is to bring about that policy, and four years on they haven't worked out what that policy entails. That's pretty remarkable. But you also write on a positive note, Brexit is a necessary crisis and has provided a long overdue audit of British realities. It exposes the nature of the economy, the new relations of capitalism to politics, and the weakness of the state. You conclude by saying, from a new understanding and new politics of national improvement might come. Without it we will remain stuck in the delusional revivalist politics of a banana monarchy. So do you think that's a fair assessment? Do you think that this could be such a a singular calamity that it may actually bring a moment of realisation as to what the limits of British power are in the 21st century and actually then we can start acting accordingly? I think yes. I'm not for everybody. I think that's a lesson that alas many people would have to learn rather painfully, but I think for sections of the elite it has. It has brought all those things and the incapacity of the conservative party to think through its main policy and the capacity of the state to plan the profusion of delusional ideas about British economic strength have made people actually look into what Britain's place in the world actually is. We've begun to understand the nature of trade, realising for example that most trade takes place within companies, within supply chains rather than in emotional free markets. We've begun to understand where British industry or where industry in Britain is controlled from. We've begun to understand that the entire car industry pretty well is foreign-owned deeply integrated into European supply chains. It doesn't make sense to talk about British car industry. We've begun to recognise the importance of service exports to the British economy, the huge proportion that go to continental Europe, the fact that half those exports come from foreign-owned firms, more than half come from London and the South East and so on and so forth. We stopped talking about trade. We stopped talking about tariffs. We stopped talking about regulations and all these vikings decades ago but they've come back onto the agenda and at least for some parts of the population with a sense of realism attached possibly for the first time. You write about the prospects for what Brexit may actually bring because of course now we're six weeks, five weeks away from this. I'm going to quote you again here. It is time to have a conversation about innovation that fits within a workable national industrial and social strategy. Though ARPA, which is the predecessor DARPA, US Innovation Agency, though ARPA's champion has now left office, Dominic Cummings, our Brexit government will likely still continue to pursue this fantasy vision. The first and vitally necessary step towards innovation policies that work and make our lives better is to dump these delusions of grandeur. The big policies that the Tories are now talking about, surely ahead of leaving European Union, the first one is this ARPA agency and the second one is a national investment bank, which was kind of fleshed out a little bit last week. Do you think these are deliverable? Do you think they could be good interventions when it comes to industrial strategy or they just completely pie in the sky? I mean there certainly could be a decent industrial policy. There certainly could be a politics of improvement. I think we certainly need that and we certainly need actually a national politics of improvement. But the policies that are proposed by the Brexiters aren't going to help with levelling up or increasing the rate of growth or anything. I think it's important to realise just how important an idea of the UK as peculiarly creative, peculiarly good innovation at R&D, at Science, has been for the Brexiters. I mean this isn't much commented on, but it is essential and it's not just Boris Johnson and Cummings, it's also Theresa May who talks about Britain leading the world into a fourth industrial revolution, understanding underneath Jodrell Bank, a symbol of 1950s British techno enthusiasm. Talking about Britain becoming the innovation hub of the of the world. Now why is this important for Brexit? It's important because the argument then becomes in order for the UK to exploit this native genius it needs to control regulatory environment. So you've got to take that away from the EU. Hence the attractiveness of no deal. Some kind of deal might imply some kind of EU influence in this area. So it's absolutely central, this notion of the peculiar technical genius of the nation. But it goes unchallenged. Why? Because a lot of people are bought into this idea. And a lot of people think it's a good idea because we do need to improve and what better ways to improve than to invest in R&D in a national investment bank. But as we know from British history, not just British history, you can invest in R&D and make yourself poorer. This is the story of much of post-war industrial policy and innovation policy. Money went into the Concorde, it went into defence equipment, it went into atomic reactors, which pre-searchers did much more expensively than coal did, let alone imported oil. So innovation is not necessarily a way to make yourself richer. It's also a way to make yourself poorer. And I fear that British innovation has been talked up to justify Brexit. And you need to maintain the illusion by claiming that you're going to you're going to invest a lot of money in innovation. It's also very helpful to claim that innovation is essential because it leads you to not have to do the things that actually matter. For example, you can talk to the cows come home about hydrogen-powered aeroplanes and the UK becoming a great hub for new electrical technologies. It's very different to have an actual policy to electrify the British economy or indeed to do something about emissions from aviation. So you can bullshit your way out of a lot by using the magic words innovation or science or technology. So do I think they're serious? I mean, I think they're serious about putting a certain amount of money into these areas. Are they serious about levelling up and transforming Britain in the ways that they want to imply? Absolutely not. So you're saying innovation has a political function? I agree entirely with that. Do you think it's just implausible? I mean, this is my understanding of it. You're a much more distinguished thinker on these things than I am. You look at a country, high GDP, medium power, 65 million people, highly connected, but it's not going to lead the world on AI, genomics, screen energies. I mean, that's just completely implausible. When the government and the elite say these things, do you think they actually believe it? Do you think the level of ideology is so deep that they've kind of internalised it? Or do you think these are declarations which just serve a kind of very expedient political purpose? They certainly serve a political purpose. Do people believe that they're not in their heart of hearts? But, and this is important, when it comes to thinking through policies, people assume that the UK can determine its own future through innovation. So there's a kind of blind spot there. So in principle, people will recognise that the UK isn't that important. But when it comes down to actual thinking about policies, people forget that and assume that we ought to be in all the technologies which are supposed to be important in the future. So it's partly elite self-delusion, yes. It's not simply to be put down to PR. And partly self-interest, actually. Because it's not a very good policy to get money out of government to say, actually, we're a bit rubbish at this, but if you put a bit more money into this, we could be better and that would be quite useful. It's much better to say we really are Minister of the Cutting Edge of this and if you put your name to hydrogen aeroplanes, you could be up there with the greats of history. But does this problem span both parties? Because when you talk about innovation, the kind of, for me, this sort of fixation with innovation and the immaterial, and like you said, this native, unmeasurable, unquantifiable national genius. I mean, you see it as well with the kind of the new labour stuff about the digital economy. And the idea, again, of Britain's singular role in the world, you still see it now with Labour, their shadow team, Lisa Nandi, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, who went to Britain, you know, this unique role to play in defending and expanding freedom around the world. Now, I'm not going to comment on any particular policy, but it does seem to me that that British exceptionalism on both innovation and on defence policy is actually one of the areas both major parties appear to agree on. And that's four years after the Brexit vote. Yes, and actually a lot of these things go back to new labour. It was Gordon Brown, first spoke at Global Britain, actually. The aircraft carriers that we see are products of new labour. They weren't dreamt up since 2016. So, yes, there is something bipartisan here. But what I would say is that the Brexiters have taken these positions to ludicrous extremes, which helps to see how silly they are. But they're not just Brexit positions, absolutely. You talk about, I'm going to quote this, it's such a juicy quote, whether or not we talk about it or not. I think it feeds into the next question I want to ask you, because it just crystallises all this perfectly. Nor has the new post-national economy thrown up transforming British entrepreneurs and firms. Were the world beating British firms to replace the supposedly dosy giants of past? There was lots of talk of startups and venture capital and all the rest. But after 40 years, what are the results? When pressed, for example, of great entrepreneurs, I get given the same tedious list of an operator of airlines and railways, a maker of vacuum cleaners, a pizza chain owner and the designer of Apple phones. So, I mean, that just seems like a very common sense conclusion. We've said that this fixation with innovation is still broadly held across both political parties. What do you think it will take before that paragraph really becomes common sense? Because it's true, we've been talking about Silicon Roundabout and innovation and entrepreneurialism for decades, and it's increasingly absurd. And I do wonder, do you think that if the next 12, 18 months don't go particularly well, there's an opening then to have that conversation about, well, actually, this isn't really where value is created. And actually, these kinds of people, these kinds of industries aren't really our future if we want to be a successful economy. Do you think that's a potential opening for potentially social movements or political parties or even just individual politicians? Yes, absolutely. This is why I think Brexit may, in its own strange way, be a godsend. It exposes the realities of the British economy and the delusions of the Brexites and the elite more generally. So, yes, I think it's very possible. And you're right, not many people have said that, but you also suggested it's kind of obvious. It's not really things as any obvious once you say it. And it's interesting how disagreement there is with those sorts of conclusions. So, I think the ground is ready for these sorts of perspectives to become more widespread and for people to act. Where does this lead us? Well, I think it leads us to a position where we need to recognize that the UK is a large Canada, not a small United States, that we aren't the most efficient economy in the world, or even in Europe, by quite a few percentage points, just to be said, that we don't have a nationally dynamic capitalism. And that this is the most important point, that we've got a lot to learn from other people. That in fact, we should pursue a policy of critical imitation rather than deluded innovation. We just need to look around the world and see what works and what doesn't. And I think COVID also helps us actually to recognize that we live in a world of possibility. That suddenly you can close down 20% of the economy. You can ensure that people have basic income that's above the Social Security minimum. That you can upgrade national and international collaborative projects to deal with problems of a very large scale. So I think it's a propitious moment for thinking seriously and properly about the politics of national reconstruction in the UK. My worries, of course, that the delusional visions of British innovative genius and British military genius will push that politics to be a politics of waste on armed forces and patrolling the sea lanes of the Far East and innovation policy, just handing up money to techie cranes. But there is room for a rich alternative to that. Can I just ask we've obviously focused a lot on Brexiteers. But it does feel to me that there is an exceptionalism on both sides of the argument, which is to say that, oh, Britain is this sort of liberal cosmopolitan polity. I don't want to talk about social values because you can't measure that. But you yourself have said Gordon Brown is the guy that comes up with global Britain. Blair is just as a sconce within this idea of innovation as the Tories are later and probably more so, actually, I think, anyway, seems more politically invested in that discourse. And it does seem to me that when you got that political polarization last year between stop Brexit, FPP, and then you got the hard Brexiteers, that's no comment on who was right or wrong. It did feel that in some ways they did have this idea of Britain being this exceptional country, not all of the FPP, no, there's many pro Europeans who are agreeing with the things you're saying, but that Britain has this unique role to play. And in some strange ways, they do mirror each other. And I sometimes reply to some of these people on Twitter and I say, I just want Britain to be a normal country. I just want a reformed electoral system. And I just want maybe like a larger Finland is such a bad thing to hope for. Is that a fair assessment? Because you talk about that, again, in the rise and fall of the British nation. And a lot of the liberal stuff we saw last year with FPP and so on, I mean, it's just amazing the extent to which it's repeating stuff that's been said for 80, 90 years. Do you think that itself comes out of a sort of exceptionalist history and canon as much as the Brexiteers? Yes. Let me just quickly say about Blair and innovation. There is a difference actually, and that is that Blair emphasised new technology in globalisation in the same breath. There wasn't a particular claim that it was British innovation that would be making all the difference, whereas that is central to the Brexiteer arguments. But yes, certainly there is a British exceptionism in new labour and on the remain side more generally. And you find that in the argument that the UK ought to have an important leadership role in the world, but it can only do it through the EU. That sort of position. So you're absolutely right. On the more general point of British exceptionism, I think it is important to say, and this thing I do century in the book, that the UK is really not that different from most large European nations by the time we get to the 1980s. It is, for example, nearly self-sufficient in food by that stage, not in the 40s or 50s or early 60s, but in the 70s and 80s. So it's not exceptional, but it was exceptional in 1900, in the 20s and the 30s, and even in the 40s. It really was a world power and it really was different in important material respects from continental European nations. The problem is that British history hasn't really, and British public culture, hasn't really come to grips with change, with that change over time. And it's become invested in all sorts of not just kind of revivalist fantasies, but also declineist fantasies, which are about finding ways to recover the national mojo. So yes, you're right. The problems go across the political spectrum. And what we need is a kind of politics of the ordinary, a politics of imitation, politics of aspiring to have the GDP per capita of Finland, as your nice example states. So yes, a politics of improvement, a politics of reconstruction, of betterment, all these very basic things. Let's improve our healthcare, let's improve our public transport. What Carol Williams and others call the foundational economy really ought to be the centre of our politics, not delusions about British genius, or delusions about Britain being a champion of free trade. I mean, that's, I mean, it's reasonable. This is the champion of free trade that is putting up tariffs against its major trading partner, quite high tariffs in many cases, and not achieving any more free trade with the rest of the world. Country that's delusional about its place in world trade. I mean, we have all this talk about Kanzuk. Germany exports twice as much as the UK does to Australia, to New Zealand, to India, and to Canada. Should we expect the Germans to go out around the world being champions of free trade? Should we expect them, they have a rule trade three times as large as Britain? Would we expect them, therefore, to have a navy three times the size of the British? Should we expect them to have six aircraft carriers rather than two British ones? Should we expect them to have nuclear weapons? I mean, what is the argument for sending a fleet to the Pacific, to recreate the China station as the interwar years? I mean, it's beyond foolish, and it won't really come to pass. And we're talking about spending money to send a ship alongside US ships from Australian ships and New Zealand ships and Malayan ships. But it's indicative of a serious delusion amongst the elite. It's not about British defence. It's not about British power in the world. It's about the capacity of politicians to partly indulge in their fantasies and partly inability to face down fantasies in their own in their own parties. That's a brilliant way to, I think that's a brilliant place to end, David, because it's a very, it's a very, it's a very, it's a very, it's a very understanding. I mean, most people can understand it's very hard to face down your fantasies and sometimes accept reality and get on with the quotidian business of studying progressive improvement. But that's realistically all we can hope to do, both as individuals and as a country. We'll get you back on hopefully soon if you're available to talk about more of this. I'd love to. And I look forward to your next installment in The Guardian with this wonderful prose on Dominic Cummings and the like. Thanks for joining us, David. Thank you, and it's been a pleasure. My pleasure. Bye. If you've enjoyed this interview, whether you're listening to it as a podcast or watching on our YouTube channel, and you'd like to see more or hear more content like it, go to nivaramea.com forward slash support help us create a new media for different politics and to focus on the big issues of the 21st century, whether it's Brexit, climate change, immigration or automation. And of course, do the very easy stuff like hitting subscribe here. We do these interviews every Tuesday with both myself and our soccer. I hope you've enjoyed it and we'll be back next week.