Perspective: No, Brexit is not really about making Britain imperial again
Supporters of Brexit march outside Parliament in London on Monday. By John Lloyd John Lloyd is co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford and a contributing editor to the Financial Times. March 27 at 2:26 PM Britain remains roiled by a struggle, both political and cultural, to leave the European Union.
And now Brexiteers suspect the remainers of scorn — with some justice. The Oxford scientist Richard Dawkins told the BBC that the referendum result constituted “a slender majority of an ignorant and misled public.” Research by the Cambridge University sociologist Noah Carl showed, however, that there was no significant difference between remainers and Brexiteers on knowledge of the E.U.
The past magnificence and the present shrinkage of Britain would appear to make the ascription of imperial longing as a prime Brexit motivation a matter of obvious common sense — not requiring proof. Scottish nationalists — though their ancestors benefited, proportionately, far more than the English from positions high and low in the imperial service — are the leading proponents of this theory. The prominent Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh refers to “the imperialist baggage of the UK state.
Indian and Irish commentators have some grounds for schadenfreude , given the terror, repression and neglect the British visited on them up to the early 20th century. American ones, perhaps less — independence needed a bloody war, to be sure, but we’ve had a special relationship since then, have we not?
A draft law — “A New Act of Union” — produced by a cross-party group chaired by Britain’s most powerful aristocrat now focuses attention on power being centered in Westminster, at once more familiar and more controllable than the European capital in Brussels, with a largely powerless Parliament. As England seeks to be a nation within a union of nations, the E.U. appears increasingly irrelevant to many English voters.
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