The United Kingdom, Brexit and its History
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2019
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In a momentous week for British politics, David Aaronovitch presents a special hour-long edition of The Briefing Room in which he asks whether the United Kingdom's history might help us to understand better the political storms buffeting the country. What has the debate over Brexit done to Britain’s political parties and its parliamentary system, what does Brexit mean for the future of the union, what does it tell us about Britain’s place in the world and what has it revealed about the state of the country and the public’s faith in government as its provider and protector?
Joining David Aaronovitch are: Margaret MacMillan, Professor of History at Oxford University Anne Deighton, Emeritus Professor of History at Wolfson College Mary Daly, Emiritus Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin Lord Lexden, the official historian of the Conservative Party Professor Ian McLean, Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College Oxford Alwyn Turner, social historian.
Producer Neil Koenig Editor Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David O'ronovich. I think we can safely call what's going on |
| 0:05.6 | a Brexit crisis. In this special extended edition of the briefing room, I don't want to ask who's |
| 0:11.8 | right or wrong, but to discover with the help of historians and constitutional experts how this |
| 0:17.3 | crisis sits in terms of the modern history of the United Kingdom |
| 0:20.9 | and what it tells us about ourselves. |
| 0:24.1 | And if you enjoy this podcast, you're pretty likely to enjoy some of our other episodes. |
| 0:28.1 | You can find all of them on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:42.6 | Events in Westminster have been so dramatic, ill-tempered and consequential that this was the week when hundreds of thousands of us were glued to the Parliament Channel. |
| 0:48.2 | There are plenty of excellent programmes on Radio 4 that will analyse those happenings for you, |
| 0:53.3 | but we want to do something different. |
| 0:56.2 | In a new book, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister William Walgrave writes that the 2016 |
| 1:01.1 | referendum had roots which lay in the slow dissolution of the national narrative of our |
| 1:06.8 | identity which was crafted after the Second World War. So what if we take several steps back |
| 1:13.2 | from the rancor and ask ourselves where this crisis sits in the nation's history and what it |
| 1:18.9 | tells us about the United Kingdom now? If you're up for that discussion, step inside the |
| 1:24.2 | briefing room. |
| 1:35.1 | At the end of last year, the eminent constitutional historian, Peter Hennessy, came into the briefing room and I asked him how he would describe the burgeoning political crisis. |
| 1:40.1 | This one's grade one listed. |
| 1:42.5 | Whatever it is, force 10 on the Richter scale, whichever measurement you choose, it is quite without precedent because of the multiple factors that are involved at the same time, and they all swirl and interrelate one with another. |
| 1:55.2 | I'm up to seven, I think, swirling crises. Can I give them to you? |
| 1:59.3 | Sure. |
| 2:00.0 | Well, the European question, obviously, but it's |
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