---
title: "The empire strikes back"
date: "2019-12-10T11:03:19+00:00"
modified: "2019-12-10T11:03:19+00:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/the-empire-strikes-back/"
post_id: 6952
---

# The empire strikes back

 ![Riley](https://rationalists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/riley-brexit.jpg)  
*This article is a preview from the* *[Winter 2019](/articles/5533/how-to-argue-better-the-winter-2019-new-humanist) edition of New Humanist*

When David Cameron decided to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, he did so with little understanding of – or even curiosity about – what this might do to British political culture. There was never a calm and collected debate about the relationship between Britain and the EU. Instead, it very quickly became a bitter fight about British identity.

The acrimony was not diluted even after the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, a passionate campaigner for the Remain cause. Cox’s murderer shouted “Britain First” as he stabbed and shot her. He was unstable and not solely motivated by politics. But the fury and anger of the campaign created the conditions for her death. It has continued. The language of traitors and surrender is thrown about in Parliament; the parties have fractured and MPs on both sides of the House (but overwhelmingly on one side of the debate) fear for their safety.

People who look at British politics with dismay like to pretend that there is a way back to safety and sanity: that we must be rational, we must face the facts, we must look at the evidence and dispassionately arrive at a sensible conclusion. But politics does not work like that. A debate about belonging cannot be unpicked through “rationality”, and people who claim to have a rational approach need to understand how to reconcile “facts” with feelings.

As a historian, I’m not sure that facts will help us find a way through this. Writing history is a process of constructing narratives; not just retelling the past, but thinking about how and why things might have happened, how and why people felt as they did, what consequences arose from their feelings and behaviour. We construct narratives by deciding which stories to tell. Those choices are shaped by many things: our material circumstances, our political persuasion, our general outlook on the world. Writing a history of Brexit will require historians to unpick the lies from the truth, but the lies will be just as important to the story; and the choices that historians make to emphasise or to dismiss different points will be shaped by their own views on Britishness, identity and belonging.

But thinking about what historians might make of Brexit is seductive, not least because it is sure to dominate the history books for generations. It is also salient because so much of our current discourse is dominated by historical interpretations of why Brexit is happening.

Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson’s *Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire* (Biteback) explicitly examines the connections between the campaign for Brexit and British history, including how history has been taught in schools and how it has been used to construct a jingoistic national identity. The book argues that Brexiters do not understand Britain’s actual place in the world due to their imperial nostalgia and failure to reckon with decolonisation.

Some of the book – the material railing against the high levels of poverty and economic inequality in Britain, or the work to underscore that it was not northern working-class communities but southern, middle-class, middle-aged Conservative voters who pushed the vote over the edge to Leave – is important and effective. Some is less so. The idea that the University of Cambridge produced fewer Brexiters than the University of Oxford because Cambridge focuses on “sciences, on evidence and facts” is not only untrue but unhelpful. History, PPE or geography have their fair share of “evidence” and “facts”; being a scientist and believing yourself to be rational is not an inoculation against troubling opinions. More seriously, the idea that flawed uses of history are confined to the Leave campaign does not stand up to scrutiny.

Another recent book does not explicitly deal with Brexit, but offers important lessons about how ideas about Britishness are constructed through historical narratives. David Edgerton, in *The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History* (Allen Lane), seeks to explain how the British nation was constructed. The beginning of the book focuses on a 19th and early 20th century of internationalism and free trade (through imperialism, but also other global connections), arguing persuasively that Britain in this period should be understood through the lens of capitalism, and the connections between money, industry and political power which shaped not just empire but also Britain’s broader global role. The end of the Second World War saw the construction of an increasingly inward-looking British “nation”, which took as its totems nationalised industries and the NHS. By 1970 the British nation was a social-democratic state, based on modernisation – in agriculture, in infrastructure and in scientific, military and technological advances. But Thatcher saw only decline, partly because of rapid decolonisation in the 1960s. Thatcherism privatised but also internationalised the British nation, as global capital swooped to snatch up British assets sold cheap. New Labour continued this transformation. Edgerton has argued that the Brexit vote might well have been motivated by a desire to return not to global greatness, but to a social-democratic, affluent, British-jobs-for-British-workers and welfare-state-for-all nation as envisaged in the 1960s or 70s.

Writers have reached for history to explain what is happening in Britain, because Brexit has become part of a much bigger argument about what it means to be British. It throws up so many questions beyond Remain or Leave: what is Britain’s place in the world? What does it mean for Britain to have sovereignty? What is the place of sovereignty in British democracy? What is the will of the people? Who are the people? These questions are rooted in debates about nationalism and national identity.

The ongoing Brexit debate is a clash between different visions of Britishness and contested versions of belonging. It is necessary to think through how and why the Remain and Leave visions of Britishness differ, and where they are the same: both coalesce, perhaps, around an image of Britain as somehow unique or exceptional, and both have a tendency to draw on historical visions to underline this.

Nostalgia for empire has been invoked repeatedly as an explanation for Leave’s victory. In this view, Brexit is motivated by a nostalgic yearning for British imperial power, which was at its height not in the 19th century but in the interwar period, when a quarter of the world’s surface was stained imperial pink on the maps and a fifth of the world’s population was coerced under British imperial rule. Perhaps Leavers were motivated by a sense of loss, at decolonisation and the end of empire; a feeling of anxiety at Britain’s declining place in the world; or the belief that Britain had somehow changed, in a curiously undefined manner, since the end of imperialism.

Tied up with all of this, of course, is the question of race. Brexit drew on and contributed to racist narratives about Britain and Britishness. The Leave campaign connected membership of the European Union to the idea of uncontrolled migration to Britain. There have been anti-Eastern European prejudices in British culture since at least the 19th century, both antisemitic and anti-Slavic. Panic around Jewish migration from Eastern Europe led to the 1905 Aliens Act, the first piece of legislation that limited immigration to Britain. During the referendum, European migration was cast as particularly suspect through the language of swamping, and obsessions around the vulnerability of British borders. There was a focus on the figure of the refugee breaching the British coast which ignored Britain’s culpability for these refugees (who are here, after all, because we were there): Nigel Farage’s infamous poster, the week before the vote, showed a stream of brown-skinned refugees moving across a border with the caption “Breaking Point” and a smaller slogan urging British voters to “take back control”.

The racial narrative around Brexit has subsequently been used to claim that Leave was driven by white working-class voters who were angry, alienated from Westminster and suffering the effects of this supposedly uncontrolled immigration to Britain. This constructs the idea of a “white working class”, whereas in actual fact, many of the poorest – and thus presumably most working-class – areas of Britain have always been some of the most multicultural areas. This made it easier to dismiss criticism of the Leave campaign as paternalistic or ignorant of the struggles faced by British working-class communities. At the same time, it allowed white middle-class commentators to use working-class communities to ventriloquise their own “anxieties” about race and immigration. A story was thus created that Brexit was a white, northern, working-class concern, rather than one situated in southern, middle-class, middle-aged Conservative territory.

### \* \* \*

The idea that Brexit was motivated by nostalgia for the empire has become a sort of truism. But it is not nostalgic merely to think about the past. It is certainly not nostalgic to refuse to think about the past. Arguably the British are not motivated by imperial nostalgia but by imperial denial: this is not a remembrance, but a silence. If Britain were really connected enough to imperial history to be nostalgic about it, perhaps the position of Northern Ireland might not have been so easily elided from the debate; perhaps the likelihood of trade deals with “Canzuk” (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) might have been more carefully explored.

A lot of the narratives around imperial nostalgia are framed around the idea that the British were traumatised by the end of the empire. But in truth, many Britons did not find it that difficult to deal with decolonisation – instead, they reframed their existing engagement with the world in new ways, maintaining imperial attitudes but shifting them onto their participation in humanitarian campaigns or onto new European connections. For many other people, of course, the end of empire was something to celebrate, and also something that drew them towards Britain.

The mass migration from empire to the metropole coincided with decolonisation, enabled by the 1948 British Nationality Act, which created the identity of a Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies who could live and work anywhere in the empire including Britain. It was curtailed from 1962 as first the Conservatives and then Labour began to pander to racist fears about migration from the Commonwealth. Nostalgia does not accurately describe these complicated connections: Paul Gilroy’s “post-colonial melancholia” might be closer to the truth.

If the sentiment is reframed from nostalgia to melancholia, the “imperial” might also be reconfigured. Arguably it was not the empire but the Second World War that loomed largest in the collective memories of the Leave campaign. The idea that Britain had the spirit to survive Brexit, as it had survived the Blitz and Dunkirk, was often invoked. The British right-wing obsession with the Second World War is curious, given the resultant “people’s peace” and the election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government. It can partly be explained through the emphasis on British stoicism, “bulldog spirit”, and a retelling of the war effort that focuses entirely on individual bravery and sacrifice over any collective endeavour: a Thatcherite interpretation of a war that, in fact, saw the massive extension of the state into ordinary people’s lives through conscription, rationing, evacuation and the blackout.

### \* \* \*

Remain also built a political case on a constructed narrative about the past. Central to the Remain case was the idea of Britain as an outward-looking, tolerant, internationalist, humanitarian and liberal entity. Continued membership of the European Union became inextricable from the idea of British “liberal values” that needed to be defended. This is often typified as a less problematic reading of history than the Leave narrative, by Remainers who decry the Brexit campaign as unrealistic or offensive.

Dorling and Tomlinson argue that Brexit might in fact open the British to a new identity that does not draw on jingoistic historic tropes. But the Remain telling of history is itself a disavowal of how central racism and xenophobia have been to Britain’s past. (To give just one example, the Kindertransport is often invoked to describe British tolerance towards refugees, but the telling does not linger on the orphans created by a scheme which refused to admit adult Jews, who sent their children alone to Britain and perished in the camps themselves.) Although there is a long history of anti-racist, anti-imperial campaigning in Britain, the history of British values cannot be extricated from the history of empire, or for that matter the histories of class or patriarchy.

If anything, the Remain campaign has heightened its embrace of this rhetoric since the vote, pining for a Britain that has been lost since 2016, or perhaps 2012, when the Olympic opening ceremony seemed to present a more tolerable construction of what British identity might mean (the suffragettes, the Industrial Revolution, the NHS, the arrival of the Empire Windrush and Britain’s first televised lesbian kiss). The Windrush scandal, which saw British citizens of post-colonial origins forced to prove their right to work, receive medical care and even reside in Britain, or risk deportation, was caught up in this narrative. Remainers repeatedly connected their concerns about the Home Office’s hostile environment policy to Brexit. This ignores the racism ingrained in the British state and undermines the experience of people of colour, who suffered discrimination long before the campaign to leave the EU.

History is a story that we tell to explain where we are today, wherever we sit on the political spectrum. All national identities are built on histories that construct barriers to belonging and narratives of inclusion. The Leavers want to go back to a mythic, monolithic British culture that has never truly existed and a moment of British global dominance that was, as Edgerton shows, extremely fleeting. The Remain campaign cannot point to a moment in British history where the nation was outward-looking and global without its power and identity being built on imperialism and racism. Brexit is a moment apart from history, which cannot be explained by lessons dredged up from the past; neither side has a monopoly on either historic truth or fiction.