Industrial action during the ‘Winter of discontent’ saw refuse piling up on the UK’s streets.

By Peter A Bell

THE VAINGLORIOUS British exceptionalism of Boris Mogg- Farage and the Mad Brexiteers may seem extraordinary, but it is not unprecedented. Even limiting our perspective to living memory, the history of the UK is littered with spasmodic bouts of feverish hyper-patriotism. In what with hindsight looks like some sort of historical leapfrog game, all of these episodes seem to involve an effort to recapture the imagined glories of a misremembered earlier bout of the patriotic vapours. And, in what should be an informative pattern, the record shows a tendency for these moments of massively inflated pride to be interspersed with periods of abject misery.

The much-vaunted strength and stability of the British state actually has more in common with the dramatic mood swings associated with a serious case of bi-polar disorder.

The media’s propensity for simplifying and sensationalising means that both the ups and the downs invariably end up being neatly defined and labelled as historical events such as, for example, ‘The Swinging Sixties’ or the ‘Winter Of Discontent’. That’s not how history works, of course. It is not a series of happenings but a process in which everything is connected in a single stream.