Britain’s imperial fantasies have given us Brexit

FULL STORY by Gary Younge: The GUARDIAN…..

QUOTE~~~

There were some sound reasons for voting to leave the EU – although the campaign was rarely fought on them, and wasn’t won because of them. And this nostalgia for a particular, and peculiar, version of our history long preceded Brexit. Remarking on the chant “Two world wars and one World Cup” that rang out whenever England played Germany at football, academic Paul Gilroy wrote, in After Empire: “The boast to which the phrase gives voice is integral to a larger denial. It declares nothing significant changed during the course of Britain’s downwardly mobile 20th century … We are being required to admit that the nations which triumphed in 1918 and 1945 live on somewhere unseen, but palpable.”