Brexit and the Politics of Nostalgia

Why Britain Was Never Really Voting on Brussels Alone

There is an old temptation in British politics to imagine that the country has somehow misplaced itself.

That there was once a moment – perhaps in the 1950s, perhaps in the 1980s, perhaps in some hazy period in between – when Britain was more confident, more coherent, more prosperous, more respected, and somehow more itself. A country that knew who it was, knew what it stood for and, crucially, knew who was in charge.

Brexit did not create that instinct. It merely gave it a ballot paper.

Much of the post-referendum debate has focused on economics, trade, immigration, constitutional law and diplomatic relations. All of those things matter, and some of them matter enormously. But they do not quite explain why Brexit became such an all-consuming national argument, nor why it still feels, nearly a decade later, less like a settled political decision than a family row that everyone agreed to pause for Christmas and then immediately resumed over Boxing Day.

Because Brexit was never only about the European Union. In some respects, it was not even mainly about the European Union. It was about identity, memory, decline, status, trust and the nagging suspicion that Britain had become a country in which too many decisions were being made by the wrong people in the wrong places, using the wrong vocabulary.

In short, Brexit was about nostalgia – not the harmless sort involving Only Fools and Horses repeats and a packet of Opal Fruits, but political nostalgia. The kind that turns memory into argument and the past into a campaign promise.

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A Country Looking in the Rear-View Mirror

Nostalgia is a funny thing.

It rarely asks whether the past was actually better. It simply asks whether it felt better, or at least whether it can be made to look tidier from a safe distance. Britain has always had a particular weakness for this. Ours is a national story full of imperial grandeur, wartime resilience, industrial achievement and a slightly romanticised belief that we once punched well above our weight and did so without needing anybody’s permission.

That story contains plenty of truth. Britain really did have a vast empire. It really did play a decisive role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. It really was a global industrial and maritime power. But political nostalgia is not interested in the awkward bits of history. It does not care much for imperial exploitation, post-war austerity, industrial decline or the fact that many of the supposed golden ages of British life were considerably less golden if you happened to be poor, female, gay, black or employed in a factory with all the safety standards of a Victorian chimney.

Nostalgia edits. That is its whole business model.

It removes complexity.

It softens the uglier edges.

It gives you the highlights package without the injuries, the corruption scandal or the manager getting sacked in November.

Britain’s relationship with Europe was especially vulnerable to this kind of storytelling because the European Union was never easy to love in emotional terms. People may value the practical benefits of free trade, consumer protections or scientific cooperation, but nobody ever hung an EU poster on their bedroom wall because they felt spiritually moved by regulatory alignment.

The European project, for all its achievements, was an awkward emotional sell. It asked voters to appreciate peace, bureaucracy and long-term economic interdependence – all worthwhile things, but none of them quite as stirring as flags, sovereignty and the promise of taking something back.

The Problem with “Take Back Control”

The genius of the Leave campaign was not merely that it found a memorable slogan. It found a slogan that plugged directly into Britain’s sense of historical grievance and longing. “Take Back Control” was never just a policy proposition. It was an emotional invitation. It implied that control had once existed, that it had been lost, and that the country could recover it if only it was brave enough to say yes.

The slogan did not need to specify what control meant because the electorate would do the hard work for it. For some people, it meant immigration. For others, it meant parliamentary sovereignty, fishing rights, border policy, national pride or a broader rebellion against technocratic elites.

It worked precisely because it was vague enough to accommodate all of them.

But what made it so potent was the word “back”. That tiny syllable did an extraordinary amount of work. It pointed not to an unknown future but to a recoverable past. It suggested restoration rather than experiment.

Britain was not being asked to leap into the dark.

It was being invited to return to itself.

This is one of the oldest tricks in politics, and one of the most effective. If you can persuade people that the future lies not in building something new but in reclaiming something old, you spare them the discomfort of uncertainty. You transform risk into retrieval. The act of rupture begins to feel reassuringly familiar.

That is why nostalgia is so powerful in political communication. It makes radical change feel conservative.

Was Britain Ever That Britain?

The obvious problem, of course, is that the Britain being invoked in these arguments is often difficult to locate in the historical record.

Take sovereignty, one of the great emotional engines of the Brexit campaign. Britain did indeed pool sovereignty with European institutions, as all member states did. But Britain also retained a remarkable number of opt-outs, rebates and special arrangements throughout its membership.

• It stayed out of the euro.
  
• It stayed outside the Schengen area.
  
• It negotiated a budget rebate.
  
• It shaped single-market policy.
  
• It helped drive enlargement.

In many respects, Britain was not a passive victim of European integration but one of its more influential and awkward participants – a country simultaneously inside the tent and muttering about the tent’s dimensions.

Or take the idea of national self-sufficiency. Britain has not really existed as a self-contained economic island for centuries. It built an empire, then dismantled it. It joined trading blocs, left some of them, entered others and remained deeply entangled in global capital, migration, supply chains and security alliances. The image of a fully sovereign Britain serenely directing its own destiny from a position of splendid isolation has always owed more to mythology than to history.

This is not to say that sovereignty is meaningless, or that Brexit supporters were duped by fantasy. It is simply to say that the political memory being activated in 2016 was selective. It drew on real emotions and real frustrations, but it attached them to an idealised version of the national past.

George Orwell would have recognised the move. He understood that political language often functions not to clarify but to soothe, inflame or mobilise. The more emotionally charged a phrase becomes – nation, freedom, control, betrayal – the less precise it often is. That is not a flaw in political rhetoric. It is frequently the point.

The Places That Voted Leave – and Why

If nostalgia were merely a sentimental national mood, it would not have been enough to produce Brexit. It needed somewhere to live. And in 2016 it found fertile ground in towns and regions that felt, for different reasons, ignored by the winners of modern Britain.

The geography of Brexit mattered.

Many areas that voted heavily to leave were places shaped by deindustrialisation, weak wage growth, underinvestment or a long sense of cultural marginalisation. These were not necessarily the poorest places in Britain, nor were they all uniformly deprived. But many shared a feeling that the economic and cultural story of modern Britain had been written elsewhere – in London, in universities, in finance, in politics, in media – and that they had been left to read the footnotes.

In that context, Brexit was not just a vote on the EU:

• It was a vote against being patronised.
  
• Against being told by people on television that they had misunderstood their own lives.
  
• Against the suspicion that the future belonged to somewhere else.

It was a protest against a model of progress that seemed to celebrate mobility, cosmopolitanism and highly educated service-sector success while offering rather less to towns whose industries had disappeared and whose local high streets increasingly looked like the aftermath of a minor evacuation.

There is a temptation among some commentators to reduce Leave voters either to xenophobes or to victims.

Both explanations are lazy.

Some voters were motivated primarily by immigration, some by sovereignty, some by distrust of elites, some by habit, some by party politics, and many by an untidy combination of all of the above. Human beings are annoyingly resistant to tidy segmentation models. If they were not, marketers would all be richer and political campaigns considerably less interesting.

Still, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Brexit became a vehicle for grievances that had little to do with Brussels and a great deal to do with Britain itself.

The Remain Problem: Selling the Present to People Who Don’t Like It

The Remain campaign, to its credit, had facts. It had economists, institutions, warnings, forecasts and a large pile of numbers suggesting that leaving the European Union would create avoidable disruption.

The trouble was that it often sounded like a campaign trying to persuade people to remain inside a status quo they had already stopped trusting.

This is one of the hardest things any communicator can attempt. It is difficult enough to sell continuity when people are broadly content. It becomes much harder when a significant portion of your audience believes the current system is rigged, complacent or indifferent to their concerns. Under those conditions, every warning about disruption can sound suspiciously like a threat from people who rather like the existing arrangement.

From a marketing point of view, this was fatal. Leave sold transformation disguised as restoration. Remain sold risk management dressed up as responsibility. One side promised agency, emotion and a return to national self-respect. The other effectively offered lower transaction costs and a warning not to do anything silly.

One can see why the latter struggled to get hearts racing.

Brexit as Brand Therapy

There is a sense in which Brexit functioned as a form of national brand therapy. Countries, like companies, tell stories about themselves. They create identities, values, myths and symbols. Sometimes those stories are grounded in reality; sometimes they are aspirational; often they are a bit of both. Britain has long told itself a story about independence, pragmatism, resilience and global significance. The trouble is that the modern world has made all of those identities harder to sustain in simple terms.

Globalisation makes national borders more porous.

Supply chains expose interdependence.

Cultural influence no longer maps neatly onto military or imperial power.

The internet has made identity simultaneously more fluid and more tribal. In that environment, Brexit offered a brutally simple brand proposition: Britain could still be Britain, provided Britain was prepared to reassert itself.

It is hard not to see the emotional appeal of that, even if one thinks the policy consequences were flawed. Brexit did not merely promise a different constitutional arrangement. It promised a more coherent national story.

Whether it delivered one is another matter entirely.