One tenth of Brits don’t know that Hitler was involved in WWII – no wonder we voted for Brexit

Modern life – lived through 24-hour news cycles, social media and TV on demand – promotes cerebral ephemera over genuine understanding

In a survey of 2,000 Britons for the History Channel, Onepoll.com tested respondents’ knowledge of the Second World War (Getty)

Last week we learned from the Office for National Statistics that the UK’s productivity problem is worsening. In his autumn statement last November, the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, noted that “it takes a German worker four days to produce what we make in five”. Well, five and a bit now, Phil.

Ask an economist and they will tell you that the reasons for the disparity are a broad lack of investment across various industries and a comparatively large service sector here compared to, say, Germany or France. A third causal feature is a lack of skills. To put that final item another way, Britain is just a bit thick.

Sure enough, if knowledge is any marker of ability, then it is hard to be optimistic. On the one hand, experts are decried as agents of the state; on the other, fake news on Facebook is Gospel. Likewise, many of those who voted for Brexit seem convinced the UK was a stunningly prosperous place in around 1953; while apparently more than 40 per cent of us don’t know the Battle of Britain was fought in the skies over this island.

This last statistic was one of several startling findings from the latest in a long line of polls which make depressing reading for anyone who thinks history is even vaguely important. In a survey of 2,000 Britons for the History Channel, Onepoll.com tested respondents’ knowledge of the Second World War and found that almost two thirds did not know which year the D-Day landings took place. Staggeringly, almost a tenth of those questioned had no idea that Adolf Hitler was anything to do with the war, while around 5 per cent thought that Britain fought alongside Germany, Italy and Japan.

Call me old-fashioned, but some of these gaps in our collective knowledge strike me as rather more than simply niche holes in our pub quiz potential. If you don’t know that Hitler led the Nazis and turned half of the earth into a bloodbath – let alone how or why – then what hope have you possibly got of understanding the dangers posed by today’s resurgence of far-right nationalism?

Indeed, with the world experiencing a considerable degree of turmoil at present, the imperative to consider events by understanding their historical context ought to be clear. Catalonia’s push for independence, for instance, isn’t only a response to a decade of Spanish recession but has roots in the repression experienced in the region under Franco’s 20th century dictatorship, as well as earlier conquests by Spanish rulers.

The Korean conundrum has to be considered as the guttural echo of the Cold War, a flashback to the era of nuclear arms races and – more locally – against the backdrop of past regional conflict both between the North and South, and Japan’s earlier colonisation of the peninsula. Tensions have been heightened by the particular personalities of leaders in Pyongyang and the White House but North Korean ambition didn’t begin with Kim Jong-un. It is one of Donald Trump’s most obvious flaws that his ego leaves no room for the possibility of historical explanation.

Given America’s own problems with its domestic gun laws, that is a shame. If Trump had considered the US Constitution within its contemporaneous milieu he might have considered that there were several experience-specific reasons why settlers felt they needed guns in 1791: for one thing, the importance of organising well-drilled militias capable of maintaining peace or of deterring potential invaders. He might then go on to wonder whether members of Congress in the 18th century would recognise in their constitutionally ratified right to bear arms the interpretation given to it by Stephen Paddock or the manufacturers and sellers of bump stocks.

None of this is to suggest that we should all simply stop looking at Instagram and start figuring out what evil parallels from history we are about to replicate – the past rarely repeats itself in the details, only the broad themes.

Still, our national failings when it comes to history scholarship seem an important symptom of a deeper malaise when it comes to developing individual and communal knowledge. To an extent, that is because modern life – lived through 24-hour news cycles, social media and TV on demand – promotes cerebral ephemera over genuine understanding. The Brexit referendum was the perfect realisation of that contradiction, concealed ironically enough by Leavers’ exhortations that EU withdrawal would enable the re-creation of an imagined age of honey, milk and unlocked backdoors.

What’s worse though is that we no longer seem to know what we don’t know, in part because modern technology means we can always find confirmation for our existing beliefs – even if they are founded on untruths. Why care what an expert says, when we are all self-proclaimed experts backed up by the internet?

This, ultimately, should remind us of history’s most important lesson: that only logical analysis of the present, allied to intellectual candour and rigorous testing of knowledge, can help us avoid a painful future.