Brexit: what’s the British Empire got to do with it?

Michel Barnier incurs Brexiteers’ wrath by
suggesting the UK’s decision to leave EU was driven by
‘nostalgia’

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The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator said that “typically British
reasons” such as “the hope for a return to a powerful global
Britain” were behind the 2016 referendum result.

“In my country, too, some politicians still prefer to live in
the past. But there were also people voting for Brexit who simply
don’t want to accept rules,” the French politician said in an
interview with The New York Review of Books. 

“Some voted to leave as they don’t want to accept the union’s
regulations on their trading. They want to speculate freely and the
union doesn’t allow them to do so.”

His comments have sparked anger among pro-Brexit politicians and
media, with Tory MP Peter Bone telling the Daily Mail that “the French don’t
understand the British, and [Barnier] doesn’t understand
Brexit”.

“What the British people voted for was taking back control and
sovereignty,” Bone said.

The Sun suggests that Barnier appears to
believe the UK voted to leave “because we’re pining for the days of
empire, rather than to take control of our laws and borders”.

But Barnier is not the first to make such a link.

British university professors Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling
have called Brexit the “last gasp of the British Empire”.

In an article on the London School of Economics website, they
ask: “Where else do the ideas of taking back control of a mythical
country come from?”

The two academics write: “Once upon a time the Romance of
Empire book series told children that England was a gallant
little nation whose power and conquests are obviously the rewards
of merit since all her opponents are bigger and uglier than she is,
and the world map had large pink bits which we were told ‘belonged
to us’.

“The Brexiteer master manipulators used such memories to take
control of the opinions of some voters through a campaign notable
for lies and misinformation.”

Frank Langfitt, London correspondent for US news
site NPR, suggests that during the referendum
campaign, Brexiteer politicians promised a “return to what Brexit
voters saw as a better time”.

“Brexiteers, nostalgic for the days of the British Empire,
feel Europe still owes them from rescuing the Continent from the
Nazis,” Langfitt argues.

His views echo those of historian Margaret MacMillan, who
shortly after the 2016 vote told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
(CBC) that many pro-Leave supporters longed for “a
simpler time, a time when you had your cup of tea and your
digestive biscuit and there weren’t any funny foreigners
around”.

That outlook would mark a complete U-turn from the stance taken by many UK
newspapers during the UK’s accession talks to the EU in
the 1970s.

The Daily Mail – which on the day after the 2016 referendum
praised Brits for “rising up against the arrogant, out-of-touch
political class” – celebrated accession in 1971 with the
headline, “Now we can lead Europe”. The Sun told its readers that
EU membership offered “an unrepeatable opportunity for a nation
that lost an empire to gain a continent”.

Regardless of why Britain joined the EU, the idea that the
decision to quit the bloc was linked to nostalgia for a faded
empire is viewed as laughable and insulting by many
commentators.

Responding to Barnier’s comments, Tory Brexiteer Mark Francois
told the Daily Express that British people “voted
to leave the EU not out of a sense of nostalgia, but because they
are fed up with being told how to run their country to people like
him”. 

Conservative MEP David Campbell Bannerman has claimed that
the EU itself is a “new empire arising”, and “not a benign,
democratic or ultimately peaceful one”.

The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore agrees
that the EU “is not, as some of my fellow Brexiteers think, a
dictatorship, but an empire”.

“Empires are not necessarily all bad,” Moore adds. “When they
work, they can bring more peace, more order and better drains, as
did both the Roman and the British. When they don’t work, they
impoverish, oppress and kill millions, as did the Soviet Union.

“On a scale out of ten, if the British Empire is seven and the
Soviet Union is one, the EU is three or four.”

However, any hopes that British Empire might rise once again to
challenge the EU are groundless, according to Philippe
Lamberts, leader of the European greens.

“You listen to the rhetoric of [Jacob] Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson
and Nigel Farage and they are speaking about the British Empire and
it is long dead,” he said last month. “Gone are the days when a
tiny country could rule over a significant chunk of the world.”

“The British Empire is long dead and because of that Brexit is a
lose-lose, so you cannot make a success of it,” Lamberts
concluded.