Vince Cable is absolutely right about nostalgic Brexit voters, and people like Nigel Farage know it

Vince Cable is in trouble for telling the Lib Dem party conference that many older people who voted for Brexit were driven by nostalgia for a Britain when “passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink”.

It’s unusual for a Lib Dem leader to cause outrage, but outrage has duly ensued, with Conservatives in particular rounding on the party leader. Tory Chairman Brandon Lewis blasted him on Twitter, describing his words as “unbelievable, rude, offensive to many” while MEP Daniel Hannan added that “calling 17.4 million people racists is unfair and unwise.”

Hannan has a point. 17.4 million voters amounts to a lot of people, and to brand them all racists would be unremittingly dumb. Which is why, presumably, Vince Cable didn’t do that – or even come close to it. He specifically said that “many older people” had voted for nostalgic reasons, and he was anyway directing his comments at his own party for its lack of diversity.

But truth was the first victim in the Brexit civil war, so perhaps we should not be unduly surprised that his words have been taken completely out of context and twisted to imply that he was saying “everyone who voted Brexit was a racist”. Easily digestible rage has an unnerving habit of getting halfway around the country before breakfast has even been served.

The uncomfortable truth is that on the specific “white faces and blue passports” point – Vince Cable is right. Indeed, that such a blindingly obvious observation should be met with such faux outrage and resentment is so ridiculous as to be comical.

Of course not everyone who voted for Brexit was a backward looking, nostalgic type – pining for the days of Empire, spitfires and a thatched roof on every home – but everyone who did yearn for those things, did vote to leave the EU.

Nigel Farage actually carried an old-fashioned blue cardboard passport about with him on the campaign trail, and would wave it about at meetings as a sort of weird “Brexit carrot” to entice people to vote Leave. Why would he do that if he really thought that voting Leave was a forward-looking venture about “engaging with the rest of the world”?

Nigel Farage waved his old blue about because he knew it would appeal to those who hankered for the past. The passport thing was a central part of the iconography of the Ukip leader’s Leave campaign, and its message was simple: “We can turn back the hands of time to an age of big impractical bits of cardboard in our pockets, when to be British meant something big as well.”

Voters were told time and time again that voting Leave would allow us to “take back control” – not “take forward control”. For more evidence, look no further than the “we won the Second World War” narrative, which played out as a sort of Brexit muzak throughout the campaign. Farage (yes him again) was actually driven about the streets of London in a bus that blasted out the theme from the Great Escape.

The legacy of Churchill and where he would have stood was bitterly fought over, with anti-EU campaigners claiming him – some five decades after his death – while his grandson Nicholas Soames tried to convince everyone that actually the great man would have voted Remain.

Boris Johnson raised the spectre of Hitler as a reason to quit Europe, arguing that Nazi Germany and the EU were both doomed attempts to run Europe and that it always “ends tragically”. The Sun had a prominent front page in which it conjured up an image of the-then Prime Minister as Dad’s Army’s Captain Mainwaring and asked (rather confusingly): “Who do EU think you are kidding Mr Cameron?”

Nostalgia is a potent and powerful force. It plays to the personal – the yearning in many for their own halcyon summer days past, when the skies were always blue, the streets were full of bobbies on bicycles and Morecambe and Wise were ever present on the TV. In this sense and for many, voting Leave was obviously a private longing written in political expression.

The trouble with memories is that they tend to be highly selective, and when we look back we conveniently erase the bad stuff: the war didn’t have a jaunty theme tune – it was in fact a miserable six years, during which millions of people died. Rationing lasted well into the 1950s.

Rickets, polio, the persecution of anyone gay or pregnant without a husband, all lasted well into recent times – along with lower life expectancy, canings in the classroom, three-day weeks and everyone dying of lung cancer.

The past may well be a foreign country, but it is not one most rational people would wish to visit.

In June 2016, the people of Britain went to the voting booths. Some knew clearly why they were voting and what they were voting for. Many others voted for the promise of a return to the past – when the map was pink and everyone was white.

I don’t think we should necessarily blame them for that, but neither should we deny it – and in trying to silence Vince Cable, perhaps the Brexiteers are merely trying to suppress an uncomfortable truth.