This week in Brexitland, December 22,2022

Why nostalgia created Brexit - and will come to destroy it, soon enough

All but the most deluded Brexiter will admit that nostalgia played a huge part in the vote to leave the European Union in 2016. A big factor in the vote for Brexit was about Britain being able to retreat to an imagined pre-globalisation era, one in which there were fewer immigrants, less poverty and England in particular was just somehow more English in an impossible to quantify way. “Take Back Control” worked as a slogan for precisely this reason - it was about the possibility of returning to something comforting and familiar for great scores of people who voted Leave.

This has been talked about before elsewhere. What hasn’t been discussed enough is how much of the nostalgia that was experienced during the run-in to June 23, 2016 was in fact nostalgia for things not actually experienced by the people in question.

When older Brexiters, those who would have been most swayed by a sense of nostalgia, talk about what Brexit means to them, two things come up a lot. One is World War 2 and how it is seen still as Britain’s finest moment as a country; the other is The Empire. The war looms large in the British (and more so in the English) psyche in relation to how long ago it happened. VE Day is 77 and a half years gone, meaning you’d have to be around 82 or so to have even the vaguest memory of it actually having happened. Boomers, the generation that voted for Brexit en masse, are people who never experienced the war and yet talk endlessly about “Blitz” or “Dunkirk” spirit.

As for The Empire, it disappeared shortly after the war ended. The British Raj concluded in 1947, which surely by any realistic assessment must mark the end of the Empire. Again, you’d have to be very old to have any real memory of the Empire even at the rag tag end, and certainly no one alive in 2016 could have recalled the British Empire at anything like its height.

The Leave vote was powered in part by nostalgia for things no one could be truly nostalgic about given they had never experienced them first hand. We need a word for this, preferably a long, multi-syllabic German one - the sense of longing for something you never had.

I believe that, just as Brexit happened in the first place due to nostalgia for things never encountered in real life, so too will Brexit ultimately be felled by something eerily similar.

I look to my own children, either born shortly before the vote to Leave or shortly following the referendum. As they grow into adulthood, I can imagine them having a parallel experience to that of their grandparents - watching a Britain that gets poorer and less influential in the world with every year and yearning for a time right around the period of their birth (or shortly after it) when everything was hunky dory. For the boomers, this was wartime and The Empire; for Generation Alpha, it will be when we were in the EU, which meant free trade, freedom of movement to go and live and work on the continent, and Britain still being one of the most important countries in the world.

Growing up with airport queues, limited opportunities outside of Britain, a country in decline and shortages of this, that and the other, Generation Alpha will long for the time just before Brexit made it all go south. They will see Covid and Brexit as being cosily similar - all part of the same, bleak time period.

The seeds of this feeling are already there - amongst 18 to 24 year olds, rejoining the EU has over 75% support. It looks likely the generation below them will be almost universally pro-rejoin when they come of age. Brexiters hold onto the idea that this will change as this cohort gets older, following the ancient wisdom that says one gets more conservative as they age. But I think this is based on a blind spot Brexiters on the right have - there is nothing conservative whatsoever about Brexit. In fact, quite the opposite. If any one word describes Brexit, it’s probably “Leninist”. Brexit was a revolution that was ill-conceived, which is a very unconservative concept to embrace.

What will come along to make those under 30, particularly young Brits currently younger than 18, change their minds about leaving the EU, making them think it was a good thing to have done after all? It would have to be something huge, something that they experience as a massive positive in their own lives on a personal level. Having stronger hoovers is not going to make up for the loss of opportunity that Brexit has created, in short.

To summarise, just as Brexit was created by a false sense of nostalgia, a whimsy for something not experienced first hand, so too will Brexit be undone by a yearning for something that occurred prior to when the voters in question were born or at least, old enough to genuinely encounter the phenomenon they crave. Nostalgia takes and then giveth back, all in due time.

With this in mind, I say again to Remainers eager for Labour to be vocally pro-rejoin, or for there to be a rush for another referendum on EU membership: time is on our side. Forget about the numbers you are seeing now on the belief that Brexit was the wrong thing to do, or how people would vote to rejoin in another referendum at the tail end of 2022 - in five years time, these numbers will look positively weak for our side compared with what we’ll have by then. Ten years from now, when Generation Alpha begin to be old enough to vote, the numbers who want to rejoin will be overwhelming. Brexit hasn’t delivered, will not deliver anything close to what was promised, and will be reversed as a result. But not any time within the next three years. It’s too soon, unfortunately. We have to allow the false nostalgia to kick in. It will, when the time is right. And it will kill off Brexit, once and for all.

Thanks for reading and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do. I’ll be back next week, the final entry of 2022, with the worst of Brexit. Until then, Happy Christmas to you and yours.