This is brilliant from James Hawes. He shows how Robert Tombs’ support of Brexit involves him in a Whig history that NEGATES his true Tory insights in his truly great history of England. He explains in effect why support for Brexit UNDOES Red Tory and Blue Labour ideas. https://twitter.com/johnmilbank3/status/1352540445084168193

Hawes makes briefly but superbly clear what I have always contended: Brexit lines up with specifically Whig myths about pure Englishness and Continental Tyranny from 1066 through Magna Carta, Reformation and Glorious revolution. It is both ‘Protestant’ and ultra-capitalist.

And as Hawes makes chillingly clear at the end Brexit is now mutating into internal ‘anti popery: with a call to weed out Remainer influence in BBC etc. As he says, this is not people vs establishment, but an ultra ‘Prot-Cap’ new Whig establishment versus older, milder version.

Thus real resistance against the new ultra capitalist Brexit establishment has to be not in the name of the older milder version but of a ‘radical Jacobite’ kind: Catholic, classical, communitarian, personalist, federalist, European, scornful, like Cobbett, of English delusions.

Cobbett and later Chesterton (for all his excessive Little Englandism and too weak sense of Britain) fully realised that the Whig England of sarcastic reason and vegetarian austerity is not the real Pickwickian, rollicking England of ale, pipes, dalliance and festive community.

The Whig England is coldly ‘empiricist’ in an atomising sense and utilitarian. The radical Tory (or Christian socialist) England is empirical in the sense of open to mystery and combines this with a deep Platonism and Christian esotericism as with Coleridge, Barfield, C Williams.

But the ‘England in its own’ of Brexit Fantasy falls naturally into the camp of cold whiggery as revealed by the way Tombs has backtracked in his real insights. Not seeing this, many in Blue Labour have been duped in just the way that the Red Wall has been duped.

And a note to Biden as it were: Cobbett’s sense of the real England undone by the Reformation went along with a profound sympathy for and resonance with Ireland: her sufferings and her cultural legacy.