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Yes, David. Declaring war, not necessarily having prepared for it, is one thing Great Britain has been very good at for a long time.
I was at an academic conference some 30 years ago and was chatting with a German colleague the same age as me (born 1941) about how France had anticipated running the Common Market with Germany as her junior partner, but that was not how it had worked out. He smiled and said (not at all unsympathetically) "But your politicians have not got to grips with your economic status. You could say there was a second 'Hundred Years War' between Germany and France and Britain and that Germany won all the battles against France. Britain, of course, won the two great battles, the World Wars - with some help - but, if you consider that Britain's aim since the Great Exhibition was to assert its industrial or economic primacy, then clearly Germany won the war, or if it sounds better, the peace. We ceased to elect pugnacious, confrontational politicians; you seem to like them. We would rather have had Britain up there alongside us, tailoring an EU to our far more shared ideas."