A small army of these rather creepy cut-outs have recently cropped up around my area, clearly intended to enhance the mood of maudlin nostalgia which has been ebbing and flowing since the centenary of the start of the First World War in 2014. There are plans afoot for this to peak in a nationwide peal of bells on the centenary Armistice Day this November.

I do not mean to demean the selfless sacrifice of the millions of men who gave their lives in that bloody epic, but I am concerned about the selective memory which tends to accompany such flag waving. For much of my lifetime the prevailing view of the British generals’ conduct of that war has been that popularised by the Tory politician Alan Clark’s 1961 book The Donkeys, although current academic revision is less brutal, more nuanced in its judgement. That said, the 1921 memoirs of a British aristocrat caught in Berlin during the war – Evelyn, Princess Blücher – reports apparently verbatim that view at the time of his British opponents by the German General Ludendorff: “The English Generals are wanting in strategy. We should have no chance if they possessed as much science as their officers and men had of courage and bravery. They are lions led by donkeys.”

One might find a similar view on the continent of Britain at this time, with the abject antics of our incompetent government making such a dog’s breakfast of their Brexit ‘negotiations’. Indeed, many sober voices across Europe have expressed incomprehension that a mature democracy should be so inclined to economic suicide. This summer, as part of their school-leaving exam, students of English in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg were asked to comment on this, and given this prompt by Indian cartoonist Paresh Nath.

It is hard to imagine British A-level students, even of German, being sufficiently sophisticated to grapple with similar machinations in ‘Mutti’ Merkel’s rightward swinging Germany. As I reported two summers ago, ordinary Germans in Hamburg were more exercised and intelligently informed about the Brexit fantasy than the majority in England, if not the UK. This blog has remained silent for two years since, as there is little I can add to the asininity of moral bankrupts sending successive salvos of demented drivel into the nomansland quagmire of their own party’s schizophrenia. While this may have the very desirable effect of destroying the Conservative and Union Party for a generation, the collateral damage to the British economy and the country’s reputation is far too high a price to pay.

As with so much, a lot is down to a fatal ignorance of history, one of the unfortunate British traits that the arch-cynic in these proceedings, the Bullingdon Club’s Boris Johnson trades upon. Passing himself off as a classicist and historian, he casts himself as Churchill Mark II in waiting, ready to save Britain in its hour of need, a need largely engineered by him exclusively to offer himself that opportunity. But, as his dire period as Foreign Secretary proved, he is unfit for high office, not least because he has no time for facts. His 2014 Churchill ‘biography’ was beautifully skewered by Cambridge Professor Richard Evans in the New Statesman. Evans lists many factual errors and erroneous claims – eg that Churchill “invented the tank and the RAF…the welfare state…and the term ‘the Middle East'” – and says  “it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster”. And Johnsons erroneous statement that Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was teaching journalists is thought to be the main reason her prison sentence in Iran was extended.

Johnson is, of course, now modelling himself on that other great enemy of facts: Trump. Johnson is the man who put the burk in burqa, not least because he was actually talking about the niqab. Fools say it was just harmless fun; though not those women attacked as a direct result. No-one should underestimate the cynicism of this man, whose dog-whistle politics is a clear attempt to capture the right-wing rump that Trump so effectively marshalls. Facts were the enemy in the Brexit referendum and they will be again if and when this vile being mounts his next assault on the pinnacle of power. One can only hope that he meets a similar end to the last English leader to oppose an actual British invasion from Europe.

Lest we forget, by 1066 Britain had been successfully invaded by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans, making our national bloodstock as polygenic as any in Europe. Lest we forget, just as the United States owes most of its achievements to the successive waves of immigration – despite Trump’s illiterate rants – Britain has continued to prosper as a result of barter and breeding with other nations near and far. Lest we forget, recent revelations that May’s evil ‘hostile environment’ immigration policy has blighted the lives of the Windrush generation are merely the tip of the racist iceberg that the whole Brexit fiasco has begun to reveal.

Reports this weekend that people, particularly  in Wales and northern England, have belatedly woken up to the fact that they had voted for their own demise and have now changed their minds are heartening. Whether this is enough to deter the shower who have hitched their boats to the iceberg is unfortunately less likely.  And even if a settlement is wrought despite the current shambles, its terms are likely to give substance to more resentment than anything caused by full participatory EU membership.

Lest we forget, the Treaty of Rome (1958) which set up the EEC, the fore-runner of the EU, was (like the United Nations) founded after two world wars and based upon the supranational Schuman project dedicated to “make war unthinkable and materially impossible”. This it has achieved. Amazon, one of the wealthiest companies on Earth, who know a lot more about the populace than any political party, has warned civil unrest is a likely outcome of Brexit. There are projections of food shortages and interruption to the supply line of spare parts for everything from cars to industrial machinery. In a century’s time, will our descendants be enjoined to remember those who fell in this latest act of national folly?

Lest We Forget 2016-2019