Thread by @Helenreflects

1/ HT @mariusturda, here's an excellent article on how Vote Leave mobilized racism in 2 mutually incompatible ways
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

2/ Vision 1: Empire 2.0. Make Britain Great Again. Global Britain etc. "an imperial longing to restore Britain’s place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist
subjugation."

3/ Vision 2: Let's get net migration down to sustainable levels, let's help the left behind who have been bewildered by globalization (Goodhart nativism)
"an insular, Powellite narrative of island retreat from a “globalizing” world, one that is no longer recognizably “British”

4/ Now it's clear those 2 visions cannot easily be combined. You cannot become Global Britain without at least noticing some of this globalization at home, for instance. Yet even now the Tory government uses these 2 narratives.

5/ Note from this word cloud of a British election study in the runup of the Referendum that leave voters weren't really interested in vision 1.

6/ the authors, Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever also argue that the Leave campaigns were so successful because they could tap into a racialized discourse that long preceded their campaign

7/ in this way, the Leave campaigners could tap into "a reservoir of latent racism
could be activated through the production of appropriately coded language
about immigration."

8/ Adding to this, by not having a single of what Brexit would look like (Global Britain or Little England) Leave became a moving target that the Remain campaign could not have an answer to, and even now, Remainers have difficulties answering because there isn't a single vision

9/ Leave could easily assuage any complaints about racism by switching from the racism against racialized minorities (particularly Poles and Romanians) by going back to Empire 2.0 and say "It isn't fair that Poles would have an advantage in coming here over say Indian nurses"

10/ Indeed, Beleave - a young, more ethnically diverse wing of the Vote Leave capaign - precisely tapped into that sentiment theguardian.com/politics/2018/…

11/ The article also includes discussion of the role of Englishness in Brexit. The authors write "The inter-locking features of racialized nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and Euroscepticism–identifiable across the whole of Europe ...–have particular resonance in England."

12/ "[UKIP] was able to gain traction by tapping into a sedimented racist nationalist populism that has been a feature of the English social formation for a number of decades."-this explains the collapse of UKIP vote after EURef as that populism is now used by Conservatives

13/ Relevant to this consider the following Ashcroft poll results:
A majority of leave voters (63%) would, if forced to choose, prefer to go ahead with Brexit than to keep the United Kingdom together. Source here: lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/upl…

14/ This picture shows the Leave voters only. All this blahblah about the union by Theresa May isn't reflected in her Leave-voting core. They'd rather tear apart the union than stay in the EU!

15/ So there are difficult choices ahead for May et al, especially if the Grieve amendment gets voted down. Soon we'll see what vision of Brexit they will want to implement. Which will it be: Global Britain or Little England /ends

PS: For those who aren't academics, SciHub link with the full article here sci-hub.tw/https://doi.or…