Wide-eyed foreigners long ago concluded that masochism was le vice anglais. Impressed by the volume of Victorian spanking pornography, the Italian critic Mario Praz wrote in the 1930s: “It seems to be an assured fact that sexual flagellation has been practised in England with greater frequency than elsewhere.” Or as a successful lawyer once declared on the theme: “Most people probably think S&M – spanking, bondage, whipping, role play like doctors and nurses, sheikhs and harems, guards and prisoners – is harmless and private and even funny.”

The late Christopher Hitchens, who claimed with pride that Margaret Thatcher once “smote me on the rear with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper”, explained it thus: “There is almost no English surname, however ancient and dignified, that cannot be instantly improved by the prefix ‘Spanker’.”

The values of the spanker have triumphed. As long as adults consent, most believe no one should complain. Less harmless, private or funny, is the more dominant (in all senses of the word) national trait of proclaiming the cleansing power of suffering as long as the suffering is endured by others. “Sado-monetarism”, as my colleague Bill Keegan called it in the 1980s, as Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe cut government spending and whacked up interest rates at the height of a recession. The millions who lost their jobs in Scotland and Wales, the Midlands and the north of England were not consenting adults as they were not on the whole Tory voters.

The story today’s right tells about Thatcher reflects none of this asymmetry of suffering. She was the outsider, it runs, who defied the experts; in her case, 364 economists wrote to the Times in 1981 to warn, quite accurately, that her policies would “deepen the depression, erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability”.

She went on to prove the pain was really a pleasure by conquering inflation, destroying the unions and restoring British greatness. The essential question of who received the pain and who escaped it is forgotten, assuming that today’s Thatcher admirers registered it in the first place.

The referendum was yet another symptom of how the old overrule the young in the modern west.

The same regions that suffered most in the 1980s will be hit hardest by Brexit. You could say that Wales, the north and the Midlands consented to sado-Brexitism when they voted to leave in 2016. Yet the right did not promise them a spanking in the referendum. On the contrary, it gained their consent on a false promise that leaving the EU would bring prosperity and restore lost greatness. As the government bulk buys fridges to store essential medicines, bulk buys ferries to transport food, as Liam Fox’s promised trade deals vanish, as investment evaporates and consumer confidence falls, the promises of 2016 are being blown away like dust before a storm. In their place comes the imagery of suffering that must be endured for the sake of a brighter future.

Just as Jeremy Corbyn’s far left, like its communist predecessors, lives off the fantasy that a crisis of capitalism will propel the people to socialism, so the Brexit right believes that suffering is essential to restore national independence from a menacing Europe.

The Second World War was the essential moment in the formation of English national identity. It is far more important than the legacy of empire and dreams of imperial greatness, however much they may animate Boris Johnson and his followers. I don’t believe anyone can begin to understand Britain without grasping that we were the only major European country not to be invaded by Hitler or Stalin and never to have experienced communism or fascism. The urgent need for postwar co-operation was never felt. Its absence alone explains the astonishing nonchalance with which 17.4 million people took the risk of leaving the EU. A perverse nostalgia for the war – because who wants to celebrate a global slaughter? – inspired Thatcher: “If we had ever looked at Dunkirk as a kind of balance sheet, as sometimes I am asked to look economically at this country, well, I don’t think we would have gone on,” she said. What mattered in the 1940s and 1980s were not the “facts” that so bothered the “experts” but “the spirit of the people”.

You could see the desire for wartime spirit resurfacing in the “Keep Calm and Carry on” posters that appeared after the 2008 crash and Cameron, Osborne and Clegg’s Churchillian claim that “we are all in this together”. They show that the nostalgia of the worst of the right for a war its supporters never fought or suffered in set a double standard that has grown as the lived experience of the 1940s has faded.

Thatcher protected her voters while hammering the manufacturing working class. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne turned benefit claimants into an enemy within and spun the fantastical tale that Labour’s generosity towards the poor was the true cause of the financial crisis. As it was with Thatcher and Cameron, so it will be with May. The referendum was yet another symptom of how the old overrule the young in the modern west.

When so much is uncertain, I can guarantee you this: pensioners, who voted for Brexit by almost two to one, will not say that in all fairness they should be the first to make sacrifices as the pain bites. Nor will any Conservative who hopes to be elected dare suggest it.

For all the attention it receives, the true English vice isn’t masochism, but a sadism that dare not speak its name. A sadism that, with a hypocrisy worthy of perfidious Albion, extols the virtues of being chastised while taking great care to ensure that, however hard the whip is cracked, the lashes always land on someone else’s body.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist