ABSTRACT
Self-evidently, Brexit mainly involved Britain’s relations with Europe. Yet even in this respect, it could be said that it wasn’t really about Europe, in so far as the causes and motivations behind it were concerned. There are good reasons for thinking – backed up by public opinion polls – that very few Britons were significantly concerned about their connections with Europe, before the question was put before them in the summer of 2016. The general idea appears to have been that much of the backing for Brexit in the referendum came from people who had not yet reconciled themselves to loss of their empire, or shed the disdain for ‘Johnny Foreigner’ that the empire was supposed to have encouraged. ‘Defending’ empire by then had become almost as disreputable as denying the Holocaust. Nonetheless, it takes very little in the way of ‘deconstruction’ to espy hidden ‘imperialist’ tropes behind the thinking of these two men, and of other upper-middle-class Brexit spokespeople.
