Who is to blame for the wartime nostalgia that underpins Brexit?

John Harris’s condemnation of the tabloid press for much of the hubris and nostalgia that underpins the Brexit “mood music” is well made (The fantasy of Britain at war could be nearing its last hurrah, 14 October) but does not go far enough. The wider establishment in the media, church and politics is deeply, if unwittingly, complicit in this.

The BBC, for example, has never ceased to mine the second world war for facile drama and ceaseless how-we-won-the-war documentaries, its current drama series, World On Fire, being the latest offering. Our ceremonies and commemorations are unashamedly martial, nationalistic and even triumphalist. At the St Paul’s service commemorating the bicentenary of Waterloo, the bishop of London praised the “courage and resolution of the great Duke and those who fought with Wellington at Waterloo”.

The flipside is an almost complete airbrushing of our colonial history.

The remembrance culture and its twin, the victory narrative, exercise a baleful influence on our culture and politics. Together, they provide a seamless story of courage and sacrifice stretching back generations in which wars have become old friends. They are both a comfort blanket compensating for the lost certainties of empire and a justification for foreign wars and grossly overblown military expenditure.

The mindset that gave us Brexit cannot be disentangled from these wider national delusions and the interests that exploit them.
Chris Donnison
Sheffield

• Sadly, the early death of his father meant that Mark Francois MP missed out on adult to adult conversations with a parent who famously served in a minesweeper on D-day. Rather less famously, my father was one of those left behind after Dunkirk, wounded by British shrapnel and narrowly escaping bayonetting in a French field by pretending to be already dead. That was followed by five years in a prison camp. He lived until the age of 89, so I was able to realise that some wartime memories are not spoken about, if at all, until many decades afterwards. Towards the end of his life he spoke to me about some experiences with the caveat “Of course, I never told your mother about that.”

This is a common pattern among survivors from both the 20th-century world wars. I am proud my father combined his memories with profound respect for postwar Germany as a nation and a delight in enjoying holidays with good friends in Bavaria. The mouthings of the Brexiter Blimps cited by John Harris are an insult to his memory.
Geoff Reid
Bradford

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