Opinion: Brexit reflects Britain’s Sentimentality for the Colonial Empire
The post-war ‘Golden Era’ of Britain is a period often romanticised in order to forget the immense loss experienced by the Empire. From the ‘Quit India’ movement in 1942 to the Bengal famine in 1943, followed by the Suez crisis of 1956, Britain’s ‘Great Exhibition’ was looking like a sad little circus. According to a 2020 YouGov poll, a third of Britons are proud of the British Empire. The Empire awarded imperial colonisers with stolen wealth and freedom just over a century ago, yet we sit today isolated and dispersed, with no individual culture to call our own. Britain is a concept tied together by fragments of international suffrage, and in 2016, over seventeen million Britons fought to maintain this position of power within a global, westernised hierarchy during the Brexit referendum.
The world has evolved since the European Economic Community of 1973, but it appears as though a residual ideology still exists and is maintained through collective amnesia of the atrocities committed by the British Empire. Edward Colston was a Tory at the start of the 18th century, but before he assumed this role in office he was the deputy governor of the Royal African Company, a forerunner of the African slave trade. It is estimated that he had a hand in the death of around 19,000 people, as well as the mass migration and enslavement of around 84,000 African citizens. A debate arose surrounding the ‘destruction of history’ when his statue was toppled into a Bristol harbour, with even the current Labour leader, Keir Starmer, arguing, “it shouldn’t have been done in that way. Completely wrong to pull a statue down like that”. Ultimately, the statue is a representation of power that Britain wielded over weaker and dependent nations. This desire to cling to Britain’s imperial past illustrates that the vote to leave the EU represented the fear of becoming equal to those that this nation once looked down upon.
The European Union itself isn’t an infallible entity - there are obvious hierarchical and colonial associations between more westernised countries, like France, Sweden and Germany, compared to Malta, Liechtenstein and San Marino, whose performing GDP is incredibly volatile and hardly recorded. Whether the E.U. was problematic is another argument entirely - I believe the underlying sentiment, exposed by the Leave campaign, is the denial of epigenetic trauma, and the sudden distaste for migration that Britain had once imposed upon millions. We can look at the Brexit vote from many different angles: a kickback at the establishment, a hope for a less codependent economy or a last-ditch attempt to save the local business. It is still important to look back through history to ensure we break the same repetitive cycle of invasive and oppressive colonial torment, especially now that Britain is the most diverse than it has ever been.
Johnson may be our Prime Minister, but he is also a prime example of this colonial bigotry. He states in one of his columns, “No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird” when describing Blair’s visit to Congo in 2002. Racism and intolerance is still found in caveats of society today, but it was structurally celebrated during the school days of current politicians and effectively forgotten in every other strain of education during that period.
One must not ignore the harsh undertones of Conservative and UKIP nostalgia for colonial victory, which was made significantly clear when Jeremy Corbyn advocated for the teaching of Empire injustice. This was met with a severe backlash that reflects the concept of British national sovereignty which Prof. Sally Tomlinson branded as ‘sugar-coated white sovereignty’. Jacob Rees-Mogg, a stain upon the reputation of the Conservative party, argued that “there were noble figures, there were honourable figures, and there were rogues. We did great things in the British Empire, but there are blots on it as well”, effectively diminishing mass murderers down to fabled foes.
Ultimately, Britain had been economically maintained by the global empire for centuries, and once this reliance waned in the 20th century, Britain suffered a great decline. The Brexit vote, which could be justified in a plethora of ways, can essentially be traced back to the economic and diplomatic advantage that the Empire handed to Britain for many years. Trading with the E.U. was a mutual economic agreement, but it would seem that Brits enjoy exploitative methods more.