Brexit is a new chapter in the grand narrative of british history | thearticle

Perhaps the greatest book ever published in English, Shakespeare’s First Folio, is divided into comedies, tragedies and histories. Brexit can be depicted as all three. The political drama

playing on the stages of Westminster and Brussels is nearly always seen as a mixture of high tragedy and low comedy. Rarely do we see Brexit as history in the making. Yet that is how at

least some observers abroad evidently regard Britain’s decision to go it alone. Almost invariably, they are more hopeful about the long-term outcome than the British themselves. Take, for

example, the news that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund intends to boost its already large investments in Britain. “With our time horizon, which is 30 years-plus, current political discussions

do not change our view of the situation,” Yngve Slyngstad, the fund’s chief executive, declared. “We foresee that over time our investments in the UK will increase.” This implies that the

details of Brexit matter less to the Norwegians than the bigger picture: a nation leaving the security of a large bloc in order to determine its own destiny. They clearly have confidence in

the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the British people. And they base this confidence, not on naive optimism, but on history. Norway itself has of course always remained independent from

the EU — one reason why it has been able to invest its oil and gas revenues in a sovereign wealth fund that now totals £740 billion. Britain, by contrast, has no sovereign wealth fund, but

has contributed about £500 billion to the EU since 1973, with another £39 billion due to be paid as a divorce settlement according to the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement. Despite more than

four decades of EU integration, the British economy remains more dynamic than its European neighbours. Last year it created nearly half a million jobs, confounding the Treasury’s own gloomy

forecasts about the effects of Brexit uncertainty. Unemployment is at its lowest since 1975. Yet far more media attention is given to plant closures such as Honda’s last week than to, for

example, the record numbers of technology startups, which rose by 14 per cent last year. Nowhere else in Europe can compete with Silicon Valley, Israel and other global hubs. The British

economy has many weaknesses, among them low productivity and expensive energy, both largely the result of misguided government policies. But over the medium to long term, such defects matter

less than the entrepreneurial spirit that has flourished here since the Thatcher revolution of the 1980s. Unlike their Continental counterparts, who tend to prefer crony capitalism and

erect regulatory barriers to new entrants, the British are not afraid of free markets and have preserved an individualist culture that encourages enterprise. This is not always obvious,

because corporate voices rather than individuals tend to dominate the public sphere. For example, university vice-chancellors complain that their sector will take “decades to recover” from

Brexit, because of the loss of EU research grants. Yet the latest QS world university rankings placed the UK second only to the US. No doubt Brexit will cause transitional disruption, but

British academic institutions are so outstanding that their European partners would be mad not to go on collaborating with them regardless of political upheavals. Making history is never

easy or straightforward, but inherently uncertain and full of drama and danger. History, in short, is human: humanity — and sometimes inhumanity— in action. That is why Shakespeare chose to

write his history plays, alongside the ancient genres of comedy and tragedy that he inherited from the Greeks. The British were pioneers of history, not only adapted in dramatic form, but as

a literary genre. Since Shakespeare, our national history has unfolded neither as a tragedy (like the histories of the Germans or Russians, for example) nor as a comedy (Italian history

often resembles _opera buffa_), but as a grand narrative. British history is full of perilous moments like the present one, when the offshore islanders and the mainland reinvent their

relationship. Fortunately, each chapter in this story has a happy ending, because neither the British nor the Continentals have anything to gain from beggaring their neighbours.