1/ One reason for #Brexit:
Within living memory the English ruled the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The English were the master race, to which even the least of Englishmen belonged, making him superior to all others. And then in around 20 years it all vanished.
Within living memory the English ruled the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The English were the master race, to which even the least of Englishmen belonged, making him superior to all others. And then in around 20 years it all vanished.
2/ So a child coming to awareness in the glow of imperial glory, reached young adulthood in a broken, dejected Britain crawling, for want of better, into the embrace of the EEC, a supplicant begging for entry into a club run by powers England had once comprehensively defeated.
3/ For those with no need for tribal affiliations, or whose affiliations were to other tribes this wouldn't have mattered. But for those who felt defined by Britishness, or more specifically, and relevantly, Englishness, this would have left a deep psychological wound.
4/ It might also have left a sense of anger and guilt, that they had impotently watched their elders fritter away such a large part of that which their parents generation had sacrificed so much to save in WW2.
5/ And then the immigrants came - the obvious immigrants of a different colour. They didn't like that, but at least these newcomers were where they should be - at the bottom of the social pecking order, low paid and the butt of racist humour and mockery.
6/ The Englishman might have lost an empire and the former imperial subjects might be unexpectedly infiltrating the homeland, buts still the Englishman could think of himself as superior to them, and emphasise that superiority through verbal abuse and discrimination.
7/ But then came laws against discrimination and political correctness, and the Englishman lost a chunk of what he felt to be his superior position. And then came EU citizenship, and he was faced with foreigners having all but identical rights to him in his own country.
8/ And still it got worse. The power which Britain had defeated (single-handedly in myth) refused to lie prone and broken at the feet of the British lion and refused to play its role of symbol of Britain's last great victory before the swift collapse of Empire.
9/ Instead the Germans became richer than the English and got better cars and autobahns to speed along, and even worse, after 1966 they started beating England at football; over and over again, heaping humiliation upon humiliation.
10/ But at least the English had the UK, over which they were the benevolent masters. But then the Scots and Welsh decided they didn't like that arrangement and the English were forced to find a flag other than the Union flag they had flown so proudly at Wembley in 1966.
11/ And so after some 400 years of being subsumed in Britain, Empire and Commonwealth, England as a nation was forced, pale and blinking, and bitter with the pain of rejection, back into consciousness.
12/ And what was this England, so reluctantly reborn? Its last real, but also myth imbued, historical memories of greatness and achievement were of the age of Elizabeth I and the buccaneers. Hardly a model for the modern age, and after them the darkness of a long sleep.
13/ And what is this England, reborn out of the pain of rejection? It is a nation with no modern history, no modern identity, just a few foggy, distorted historical myths. It has lost the empire and Britain, and it has found no solid identity to replace what it has lost.
14/ So without any solid sense of itself, England as a nation, has become a kind a void, filled with pain, anger and resentment, yearning to recover what it has lost, and defining itself, for wont of anything better, largely through hostility to what is not English.
15/ And so the ageing Brexiters, guilty and humiliated by England's decline, seek one final epic victory to redeem themselves, to restore England to the buccaneering endeavour of the first Elizabethan age, to once again free England from the grasp of the European powers.
16/ In the struggle for Brexit the ageing Leavers are finally fighting a war to match those fought by their parents and grandparents, a war to make them fitting descendants of their ancestors, and leave a lasting monument to their love of their country.
