For Brexit leaders ‘the empire was celebrated as a great thing’
DER SPIEGEL: In your book “Rule Britannia,” you argue that the main reason for Brexit was that “a small number of people had a dangerous and imperialist misconception of Britain’s standing in the world.” Is Boris one of them?
Danny Dorling: Yes, Boris and (member of parliament) Jacob Rees-Mogg are the more obvious ones. But there are many others. They’re almost all white men with similar backgrounds. Almost none of them were average or poor. They were in the top kind of five percent or one percent in society. Take the billionaire James Goldsmith for instance, who started a party purely to demand a referendum on our membership in the European Union. Many have forgotten that because it was 25 years ago. It’s a wider group of people, many of them educated in Eton and a lot of other private schools where old-fashioned history was taught longer then in public schools. Sometimes they even teach it nowadays.
DER SPIEGEL: What do you mean by old-fashioned history?
Dorling: Well, using textbooks from decades earlier. And talking about national pride all the time, having a school chapel like an Oxford College Chapel in which the names of all the old boys who died in the wars are engraved. The central monument in Oxford in Bonn Square is a memorial for the English who died taking over an entire province of India. The people who pushed for Brexit and have been pushing for it since the 1990s were much more likely to come from that kind of a background, where the empire was celebrated as a great thing. We civilized most of the world. The empire is bigger than all the other European empires put together.
DER SPIEGEL: The empire is long gone though.
Dorling: But it still exists in the idea of Britain. Britain only came together to form an empire. The act of union was done at a point when we realized that the Spanish were going past us with ships full of gold. And we’d be better off not fighting each other and fighting them and taking over more of the world than Spain. And that sense of greatness persisted because we were never invaded. [Continue reading…]