Can a post-Brexit Britain face up to the legacy of its lost empire?

David Winner says just under the surface of Brexit lurks lingering English nationalism that never came to terms with losing its empire, and with the negative aspects of that imperial legacy

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Nigel Farage, then leader of the UK Independence Party, speaks to the media in London a week before the vote on Brexit in June 2016. Farage said this week that he might support a second referendum on Britain's European Union membership to kill off any prospect of staying in the bloc. Photo: AP

Published: 2:15pm, 12 Jan 2018Updated: 7:41pm, 12 Jan 2018

Why did Britain get itself into its Brexit mess? Immediate causes – miscalculation by former prime minister David Cameron over the 2016 referendum, the influence of anti-European newspapers, and so on – are well known.

But deeper cultural forces are also at work. Emotionally underpinning the drive to leave the European Union is an English nationalism rooted in that rarely discussed trauma, the hangover of empire. The days when British maps showed a quarter of the globe coloured pink have long gone, of course. But the English continue to feel their lost empire the way amputees feel a vanished limb.

This was rarely discussed directly in politics, but the condition (and its attendant delusions and prejudices) festered for decades in the important and emotive symbolic realm of sport, especially football.

Empire and football always went together. The game was nurtured in the elite private schools of Victorian England and still carries a stamp of its use as an educational tool for inculcating imperial values and “manliness”. One key attitude concerned contempt for foreigners. The English didn’t just play the game. They also had to be the best at it, for winning at sport demonstrated their superiority as a people and justified their global pre-eminence.

Britain’s geopolitical status and its footballing hegemony both faded in the 1950s. As the empire fell, the team started losing to foreigners, famously crushed 6-3 by Hungary in 1953. Yet Britain never suffered a national shock equivalent to the French defeat in Algeria. English exceptionalism survived intact and the country remained emotionally hard-wired to expect supremacy.

A dejected English soccer fan in central London reacts to learning that England lost its bid to host the 2018 Fifa World Cup in December 2010. England last hosted the World Cup in 1966, which is also the last year that it won. Photo: EPA

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