The poverty of historians

An authoritative piece in the Observer today showing that Brexit might be in trouble. A study uses polling data to suggest that opinion in a number of Parliamentary constituences has shifted substantially and that a majority now favour remaining in the EU. The details are a bit vague as yet -- the study

combined the polling with detailed census information and data from the Office for National Statistics....multi-level regression and post-stratification, similar to that used by YouGov in its pre-election model, which proved far more accurate than conventional opinion polls. However, the polling sample used by YouGov for its election model was much bigger, covering some 50,000 people. 

And there are some interesting anomalies:

The doubts among Labour Leave voters have been accompanied by a less dramatic hardening of Brexit support among Tory voters. While no constituencies saw a switch from Remain to Leave, support for Brexit went up in some constituencies

So the implications for a national referendum are still not clear? This study seems to be connected to a strategy to persuade MPs to reject any deals and Remain, reassuring them that they are unlikely to be voted out?  

But what sort of journalistic values then adds to this study a ludicrous piece by an historian, the egregious D Olusoga?

Peterloo 1819. Destroyers on Mersey, tanks in Glasgow 1919. In 2019? 

Is revolution in the air? With dark mutterings of betrayal and warnings of catastrophe it is not too far-fetched to see a pattern  

If ever there was a ridiculous argument....There were dark events in 1919 and 1819, we are told, and of course there will be an equally disastrous event in 2019.' It's all really spooky: 'for some reason we have a problem with 19th years.' Did 'we' somehow forget in this story 1805--15,  1853--56, 1914--18 or 1939--45?  Or did 'we' scratch around for some way to add fuel to the fire of panic about an impending Brexit by searching desperately for apparent precedents and finally light upon this preposterous idea of some magic problem with 19th years?

On it goes: 

talk of large-scale job losses, a sterling crash, the stockpiling of food and medicines and crops rotting in the fields or in the backs of lorries on the M20, combined with dark mutterings from the Brexit camp about betrayal, raises the prospect that next year we might make it three in row [sic]

 The clincher must surely be this:

The odds on 2019 becoming another of history’s ugly sisters shorten further when we remember that Nigel Farage, the leader of what purports to be a political party, warned last year that if Brexit were not delivered, the result would be “widespread public anger in this country on a scale and in a way we have never seen before” and that he personally would “don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines”. Political leaders in healthy democracies do not speak like that. This is not normal.

And to round it off:

Just as today’s historians are struck by the parties and general joviality that characterised the long hot summer of 1914, future scholars might wonder how we remained so calm as we approached the edge of the cliff, especially as the decisive moment happened to come in a 19th year.

Would this sort of stuff, more akin to astrology than history ever have seen the light of day in a 'quality' newsapaper if its perceived ideological importance were not so obvious?The whole episode is also revealing about activist historians like Olusoga. British historians were always scornful about 'methods', arguing that actual history was too complex to be managed by theories or methods designed to test them. But all this did was to leave a vacuum for ideologies to fill, beliefs in inherent complexity, the role of great men etc., or some commitment to activist politics, with history as the unwinding of oppressions of various kinds. Now history seems to be about telling whatever arbitrary story serves your immediate purpose.