The United Kingdom has been a hot mess for a while now.
Order.
Behave yourself. Be a good boy.
For the past 3 years, the country has been divided by one word:
Brexit.
The playful fun name that's been given to a disaster.
And if you think you’re confused about what’s been going on in the UK…
Can you explain what the hell is going on over there?
imagine how the Brits are feeling.
I can't do anything.
I'm just watching horror, I suppose, at what's going on in the country.
But there’s a plenty of history behind the current crisis:
the connection to World War II,
which is still a huge part of Britain’s national identity,
and the fairly recent decline of the British Empire.
Britain’s identity crisis is actually nothing new.
How did the world’s biggest empire deal with, well, not being an empire anymore?
Hint: not that well.
Let's get Brexit done.
We're going to look at how the myths around Britain in World War II,
and the longing for its imperial past, helped shape the Brexit debate.
First things first:
The British Empire ruled over several continents for several hundred years.
At its height in 1921, the British Empire was directly or indirectly
ruling over almost half a billion people –
treating them like subjects rather than citizens.
And the territory was so vast, it was famously said that
“the sun never sets on the British Empire.”
For it is the empire, which includes one quarter of all the land
and of all the peoples of the world,
that gives to Britain its position as a first class power.
This history of power and, essentially, a white-supremacist enterprise
is a huge part of British national identity.
There's a lot of confidence that many Brits feel about their place in the world.
They see the British Empire as a good thing.
It reflects the global role and ambition that the UK should still have today.
But it was something that happened in the late ‘30s, early ’40s
that would cast a shadow on events that would take place in Britain generations later.
There’s one person from WWII who keeps popping up in British political discourse:
“In my office, there’s a bust of Churchill.”
Ah, Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Churchill is a surprisingly uncontroversial figure in the UK,
hailed as a national icon for saving his country from defeat in WWII.
He was also an overt white supremacist.
Churchill was blamed for the Bengal famine
that avoidable catastrophe saw some 3 million Indians die of starvation.
He was also blamed for policies that violently suppressed
the anti-colonial resistance across the empire.
Fifty years after his death, Churchill’s name is invoked by both sides
in the Brexit debate.
Churchill is this kind of pugnacious symbol of a nation,
this kind of bulldog figure who's going to, willing to face down overwhelming odds.
And that's been a particularly attractive symbol and attractive myth for Brexit supporters,
for Brexiters.
But what does Churchill and WWII have to do with Brexit?
Well, the story that’s often told is that Britain was an island nation that stood alone
against Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1941.
1940 is kind of the key.
It's the key point in the Second World War for Britain, for British people, and actually,
increasingly, for English people.
And that same rhetoric of an “isolated Britain” standing against a dominant European power
was played out during Brexit.
Only this time, it wasn’t Nazi Germany.
It was the EU.
Here’s the problem though.
The image that Churchill helped popularize of small, island Britain standing alone against
a massive European power is not entirely true.
I think that it's ironic that Britain remembers itself as alone then,
because it never was alone.
Because it had a huge empire, which all went to war with Britain.
This means soldiers from British colonies were fighting in a war that didn't
really have anything to do with them.
2.5 million men from the Indian subcontinent fought in WW2,
as did some half a million African soldiers.
Author Yasmin Khan once said that Britain did not fight the Second World War,
the British empire did.
This idea of 1940 is the kind of high point of British history,
particularly high point of Britain in the second world war is,
it's much more kind of mythology than history.
It's a kind of a very romanticized view of the past that leaves an awful lot out,
in particular the role of the empire in 1940, the importance of the empire.
Brits talk about a Blitz spirit - when their cities faced bombardment from German forces.
It’s that courage and spirit of keeping calm and carrying on during tough times
that the Brexit movement is tapping into.
[The WW2 myth] is a lazy use of the past, but I think it's because they have an emotional
resonance, for a lot of British people.
They recognize that, they recognize Churchill, they recognize the idea that actually
the second World War, particularly 1940,
was a moment when the country came together
and it's a moment that actually, you know, 1940 in many ways, there is lots to be proud of.
After the war, the sun began to finally set on the British empire.
Millions of colonized people were demanding freedom and self-determination.
After the empire collapsed, two crucial things happened:
First, another global power conclusively took Britain’s place:
the United States of America.
We shall send you, in ever increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns.
That is our purpose and our pledge.
Secondly, the demographic make-up of Britain began to change.
It needed immigrant labor to rebuild its economy post WW2.
People invited from Caribbean countries were known as the Windrush generation,
named after the ship which arrived with 500 Jamaicans.
In the ‘50s and ’ 60s, Britain saw an influx of Pakistani, Indian and African immigrants.
The changing demographics led to the infamous and inflammatory
1968 "Rivers of Blood” speech by Conservative MP Enoch Powell.
He railed against mass immigration.
In this country, in 15 or 20 years time,
the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man.
And then, fast-forward to 2004 when Eastern European immigrants began arriving in the UK
after their countries joined the EU.
We''re welcoming 10 new member states into the European Union,
and today marks a new beginning for Europeans.
Britain is definitely having identity crisis.
I don't think it's being caused by Brexit.
People want to go back to a time when they felt “safe”
and when they felt that things weren't changing,
and that's often framed in terms of race and migration.
So, Britain’s diminishing world power ended up meshing together with immigration
that challenged both white British identity
and triggered anxieties about jobs and resources.
You cannot say anything about the immigrants...
but all these Eastern Europeans who are coming in...
And guess who got blamed for that?
Everyone is talking about the EU, and you might be thinking,
what is it and what does it actually do, other than be the source of arguments?
Here's a super quick rundown:
The EU is a political and economic union of 28 countries (soon to be 27).
They trade with the rest of the world as a single bloc,
and, most importantly, operate as a single market.
This means there is freedom of movement for goods, people and money.
The EU has a cabinet, which proposes legislation and sets policy
on issues like the refugee crisis.
But this vast alliance spanning the continent didn't come out of nowhere.
Like modern British national identity, the EU also has its roots in war.
After 1945, world leaders not only wanted to put an end to the bloody wars that had ravaged Europe,
they wanted to prevent further conflict in the region.
They believed that by creating an alliance and a single economy,
the continent would be better off, with more prosperity.
A “united” Europe was also seen as a crucial political and economic alliance against the Soviet Union.
Britain didn’t join until 1973.
I don't want to see us in Britain deliberately turn away
from the continent in pursuit of a theoretical freedom.
For the UK, joining a European single market meant a way to avoid economic decline.
The new European bloc was doing deals with the Commonwealth and also had American support.
Britain didn’t want political isolation within Western Europe.
For the British, really, once you started to see other countries come together,
it made more and more sense for them to be on the inside.
And, to be honest, the UK didn't really have a good alternative,
for all the talk about the Commonwealth as a successor to the empire.
It's a much looser relationship and not one that was going to deliver the same economic benefits.
So really the UK fell into the European integration process through lack of a better alternative.
Believe it or not, there was actually a referendum in 1975 on whether the UK should stick around
with some surprising supporters.
Yeah, the Brits love referendums on Europe.
They stuck around, but that didn’t end Britain’s skepticism with the European alliance.
The fact is, they have no confidence on money, no confidence on their economy.
No, no, no.
That’s British Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher again.
While the European Commission was calling for strengthening unions,
Thatcher and her government were working hard to disempower them.
To an extent, I think Thatcher is definitely remembered, certainly by Brexiters as being anti-EU.
And she increasingly became, I think became opposed to to some elements of the EU
while she was prime minister.
And in 1988, she said this:
We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them
reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
And for almost three decades, Eurosceptics
have latched onto this monumental speech.
There's always been something that looks like
Euroskepticism and the British debates and actually other countries, but Margaret Thatcher
was central in bringing that together.
And really that crystallized a lot of opposition, particularly in the UK, towards the project.
That opposition eventually led the UK to make one of its biggest political moves since WW2.
In 2016, the Brits faced a tough question:
Should I stay or should I go?
Then Prime Minister Cameron led the campaign to stay.
Let me be clear - leaving Europe would
threaten our economic and our national security.
But for others, leaving the EU meant...
independence, free from the EU's rules.
One of the supporters was this guy:
current Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Because I want a better deal for the people of this country, to save them money
and to take back control.
To support his position, Johnson invoked World War II rhetoric that painted the EU as another
European attempt to take over Britain.
In the end, over 17 million voters, that’s almost 52% of everyone who voted,
decided to Leave.
Xenophobic rhetoric stood behind the Brexit campaign.
This anti-immigrant poster - stoking fears from the European refugee crisis -
was just one example.
In a way, that’s tied to self-image and the desire to
“take back control,"
“take back control."
But by tugging at so-called patriotic heartstrings,
it presented what critics call a false pretense for what post-Brexit could actually look like.
References to war and overcoming hardship
didn’t stop after the final vote was counted.
If you put a country like Britain into a corner, we don’t crumble. We fight.
Staying the course when the going gets tough. I think any student
of history would say that's more or less the definition of being British.
There’s worries about food shortages, with the food lobby calling Brexit the “biggest
challenge” since the war. Boris Johnson set up a Brexit committee, popularly named
the “war cabinet”, even though the country’s not even in a war!
The second world war was a very positive historical reference point for, for British politicians.
The British tend to look favorably on their history and draw a positive line into the
future that things were very good and they can be very good again.
Brexit means Brexit.
Erm, ok, but what does that actually mean?
It's important to note that Scotland and Northern Ireland are not necessarily down to leave the EU.
Scotland is considering a second independence vote, a re-do of their 2014 referendum.
Some Scots hope they can gain independence from Britain and re-join the EU on their own terms.
Brexit has also reopened debates about Irish borders
and reignited a long-time beef in the Emerald Isle - formerly a British colony.
Within the UK, there is a stark generational divide, too.
Young people overwhelmingly want to stay in the EU.
Some are worried Brexit may complicate their access to jobs,
higher education and free movement within Europe.
And in case you're wondering, yes, there was also a racial divide in the Brexit vote.
73% of Black brits voted to remain in the EU,
as did 67% of Asian voters.
There are also concerns about what white’s Britain’s nostalgia for the empire
means for people of color in the country.
It seems like no one really knows what Brexit will bring,
and that fear and uncertainty is taking a toll on the Isles.
But regardless of what happens to Britain without the EU,
is this the beginning of a new era for British identity?
Or does this new era of chaos in Britain show just how hard it is
for the country to move on from its global, imperial past?