T HE CENTENARY of the armistice on November 11th is a welcome reminder that historical memories can unite the country. It is an unfortunately rare one. These days history is more commonly used to divide and inflame. The right of the Conservative Party and the left of the Labour Party—the ideologically ascendant factions in their respective worlds—are wedded to sharply contrasting interpretations of British history, which focus on very different events and freight them with very different emotions. Let us call them the Waterloo and the Peterloo interpretations.

Waterloo was one of Britain’s greatest victories over the French. In 1815 the Duke of Wellington ended Napoleon’s career for good and inaugurated a long period in which Britain could play Europe’s leading powers off against each other, to make sure that no new Napoleons could emerge. Peterloo, in 1819, was one of the worst peacetime massacres in British history. Troops charged into 100,000 peaceful protesters, who had gathered to demand more political rights in St Peter’s Field, near Manchester. Fifteen people were killed and hundreds injured.

The Labour left is obsessed with Peterloo. Jeremy Corbyn, the party’s leader, highlighted the massacre in his speech to Labour’s annual conference in September. The demonstrators were killed by “troops sent in by the Tories to suppress the struggle for democratic rights,” he noted, adding that Labour’s slogan, “For the many not the few”, was coined by Percy Shelley in a poem commemorating the massacre. Mike Leigh, one of Britain’s leading film directors, has recently released a film about the massacre called “Peterloo”. The two-and-a-half-hour epic is not up to the standards of “Life is Sweet” and “Topsy-Turvy”. But, partly because it is so caricatured, it provides a good view of the Corbynite historical imagination. The established rich guzzle food and drink, the new rich grind the poor with the help of dark Satanic mills and job-destroying machines, the poor try to improve their dismal lot through peaceful protest, and the establishment responds by crushing them. Maxine Peake, one of the leading actresses, has driven the film’s message home by comparing Peterloo to the more recent disasters at Hillsborough stadium and Grenfell Tower.

The Peterloo interpretation sees British history as a story of ruthless exploitation and intermittent resistance. What few rights the workers enjoy, they have as the result of heroic struggles led by a vanguard of activists who must fight against both the ruling class, who try to suppress them, and class traitors, who don’t understand the true meaning of history. Mr Corbyn is much happier talking about history than economics. His favourite historical figure is John Lilburne, a 17th-century Leveller who devoted his life to agitation. (“If the world was emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne,” one contemporary said.) He is fond of Marxist historians like Christopher Hill, author of “The World Turned Upside Down”, and E.P. Thompson, who wrote “The Making of the English Working Class”.

The Waterloo interpretation of history is the opposite. It celebrates our island story rather than lamenting it (and frequently slips into calling that island England). This school reveres the role of great men, particularly great military commanders, rather than agonising about the labouring masses. It also focuses on constitutional innovations rather than economic struggles. For Waterlooists, England’s unique achievement was to limit the power of the over-mighty state through constitutional reforms such as Magna Carta, the establishment of Parliament and the common law. These innovations made British history fundamentally different from continental history. Whereas the continent had absolutist rule, the Napoleonic code and endless internecine wars, Britain had peaceful constitutional evolution, protection of individual rights and a globalised economy.

A striking number of the leading Brexiteers are either history graduates or history buffs. Sir William Cash, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan all read history at Oxford. Mr Rees-Mogg has argued that Britain’s vote to leave the European Union is “as worthy for celebration as victory at Waterloo or the Glorious Revolution”, and defined Brexit as “a victory of British liberty over Bonapartist autocracy, and for free nations over foreign tyranny”. Mr Hannan has written a book called “How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters”. Michael Gove, the environment secretary, is an omnivorous reader of history books who, in an earlier role as education secretary, tried to refocus the history syllabus on teaching facts about British history.

These polarised views leave a lot to be desired on the scholarly front. The Peterloo interpretation ignores the role of judicious reform. The British ruling class did terrible things but it was restrained compared with its continental counterparts. “Only in England do they call that a massacre,” sneered one French diplomat. The Waterloo view downplays the role of imperialism and plunder in the making of Britain. (It also downplays the fact that Waterloo was “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”, as Wellington put it, and would not have been won without the help of the Prussian army.) Both views ignore the importance of entrepreneurial innovation and free trade in raising living standards. The starvation that Mr Leigh decries in “Peterloo” was eventually alleviated by the repeal of the Corn Laws and the import of grain.

Couldn’t escape if they wanted to

The clash of historical visions will remain at the heart of politics for some time. During the Blair-Cameron years, when policymakers all accepted the virtues of market liberalisation and quarrelled about means rather than ends, economics had a good claim to be the queen of the sciences. Today the crown has been passed to history. Economics has lost much of its lustre since the financial crisis. History, by contrast, appeals to people’s quest for meaning and identity in a world that too often deprives them of both.