Screenshot from the short film 'UK Independence Day'. (Fair use)
In a campaign dominated by nostalgia and hyperbole, nothing quite matches Daniel Hannan’s extraordinary short film ‘UK Independence Day 2017’. Stirring music accompanies images of regal pomp, as a news ticker touts unlikely headlines (“Unemployment falls by 20% according to the Office for National Statistics”), before Hannan intones a Wordsworthian ode to the pastoral, and declares England “a blessed country” whose “story is not yet told… whose song is not yet sung”. In amid the bombast, one can discern a quiet grief: that Britain has yet to come to terms with the fact that it no longer rules the world.
A visitor to Washington D.C. or Beijing senses that, for all the legion problems in both capitals, they are energised by a belief in being able to forge the future – even if neither prospect offers a vision of global justice. What the British are mourning is not their sovereignty, but their dominion – just ask the subjects of the Empire how our “song” sounded when they heard it last.
The following little-known poem by W.H. Auden is not one of his finest, but it is profoundly revealing of this nation’s mindset of mourning. It was written in September 1932, as economic depression engulfed Europe and the British Empire was beginning to crumble, from India to Iraq (which declared independence in October of that year).
