Nostalgia: Britain’s (not so) secret weapon – and weakness

It was the gulp wot won it. That gulp you took when you heard or read this:

“There is not a cemetery in Europe that does not have Scots, English, Welsh, and Irish lying side-by-side. And when young men were injured in these wars, they didn’t look to each other and ask whether you were Scots or English, they came to each other’s aid because we were part of a common cause.”

Relax – this will not be another “how Gordon saved the Union” piece. Lots of factors combined to drag the No campaign back on track and establish that 55% share of the vote. Lord Ashcroft’s post referendum research suggests a solid proportion of No voters knew all along which way they would vote. And while these post hoc enquiries can never be completely reliable, this one suggests it would be wrong to single out one intervention or speech as having been supremely influential.

What struck me most about the passage cited earlier was its use of history. In this centenary year of the start of the first World War we might be a little more susceptible to an invocation of wartime solidarity. But how much longer will politicians be able to refer back to great war efforts of the past and still cut through to the public in the way Gordon Brown clearly did?

The answer, I suspect, is much longer than you might think. OK, we may never match the Serbs, who still look back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as one of the proudest moments in their history (NB – they lost). But even almost 70 years after the end of World War Two our appetite for looking back seems unlimited.

This is problematic. When Churchill declared, on the eve of the Battle of Britain in 1940, that the country was perhaps about to have its “finest hour”, the rhetoric was stirring. But what happens to a country that has had its finest hour? Churchill may not have been a great success academically, but he will have known that you cannot do better than a superlative. If a country has achieved its finest hour does that mean it is all downhill from then on?

That in a sense is the nagging question that lies behind Britain’s never-ending nostalgia. It is, as Brown showed last week, a (not very) secret weapon that can be deployed to great effect. But it is also a weakness. Labour’s 2005 general election slogan – “forward, not back” – may have lacked subtlety. But it did at least point to that important (and often election-winning) quality: being able to look ahead and offer an attractive vision of the future.

If you can’t do that then rose-tinted nostalgia can be a useful second best. Part of the Nigel Farage appeal is to suggest that Britain has lost its way, rejected its past, that things would perk up enormously if we just got back to how things used to be. It is a sentiment that seems to lie behind Paul Dacre’s distinctive editorial drive at the Daily Mail. It strikes a chord with many. The country’s favourite sitcom? Dad’s Army.

But it is an abdication of a politician’s responsibility to say that we just need to turn the clock back and all will be well. Listening to a clip of Tony Blair addressing the Labour party conference in 1994 on Radio 4’s The Reunion last week you could hear him declare that the party had to engage with the modern world and not be a historical movement. That too was stirring stuff – and explicitly forward looking.

No-one has summed this dilemma up better than Chrissie Hynde. As she sang in The Pretenders’ “Hymn to her”: “Some things change, some stay the same”. There are no known exceptions to this rule. Of course you must be aware of and have respect for your history. Some things need to be protected and preserved. But political leaders also have to try and steer a path into the future – preferably a better future. And that is what Ed Miliband has to do tomorrow.

Forward, not back!