Brexit biographies: Everyday articulations of race,class and nation through the keyhole issues of Empire and ‘culture wars’

Abstract

Some media and political science narratives suggest post-Brexit Britain is locked in a culture war epitomised by the differences thought to divide Leavers and Remainers in terms of their national values, classed and racialised identities. This article sets out to provide a more complex depiction of reality. To do this, we draw on in-depth interviews with individuals across Leave, Remain, national, migrant, racial, ethnic and class identities to trace how they articulate ideas of Empire and nationhood when they discuss Brexit and the legitimacy of statues linked to British histories of colonialism and enslavement. We explore the contrasts and complexities in the ways in which individuals supporting Leave or Remain mobilise what we call their ‘Brexit biographies’ when they think about questions of Brexit, Empire and nationhood. On the one hand, our Remain interlocutors articulate more politically progressive racialised and classed articulations of Brexit, Empire and nationhood compared to some Leave supporters. However, on the other hand, when we switch context to examine the legitimacy of statues commemorating histories of colonialism and enslavement with some of the same individuals this distinction in the values of Leave and Remain supporters begins to break down. Our contention is that detailed sociological attention to the connections uniting Leavers’ and Remainers’ reflexive worldviews is required to properly comprehend how individuals experience, as well as reproduce and dislodge, racial, class and national inequalities that underpin the fabric of British society.

Introduction

There have been two recent pivotal processes that have provoked widespread intellectual, media and political discussion on the significance of Empire in the constitution of British national identity. The first process was the EU referendum held in June 2016, which led to media commentators, politicians and intellectuals reflecting on the differing ways in which Leave and Remain voters think about the significance of Empire in defining Britain’s national identity. This was followed in May 2020 by public debate and protests over the legitimacy of statues that were thought by activists to ‘celebrate’ people and events linked to imperial exploitation and enslavement. The latter was sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black American man murdered by a white American policeman, and the consequent increase in the worldwide influence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Within the media, intellectual and wider public discourse these events became indicative of a ‘culture war’, typically identified with the United States, emerging within British society, centred on divisions amongst the population in terms of Leave and Remain, racialised and classed identities and values (see Tyler et al., 2022 for a detailed discussion of this public discourse). Central to this pervasive media narrative is the idea that Leavers have a nostalgic view of Empire and nationhood, whereas Remainers are thought to have a more critical view of the imperial past and its implications for the constitution of the present (see Saunders, 2020 for an account of these contrasting perspectives).

In this article, we set out to interrogate these assumptions by providing a more complex and truthful picture of reality. To do this, we pay attention to how individual Leavers and Remainers mobilise what we call their ‘Brexit biographies’ to contextualise their thoughts on Brexit, Empire and the legitimacy of statues commemorating national histories of colonialism and enslavement. In so doing, we examine how individuals across racial, ethnic, national, migrant and class identities evoke their backgrounds, life experiences and place-based relationships to situate their thoughts on these processes. Significantly, our biographical approach opens up a productive avenue to explore the regressive and progressive views and values that not only divide Leavers and Remainers, but also crucially what brings them together across these differences. Indeed, we illustrate how sociological attention to the progressive views that unite Leavers’ and Remainers’ worldviews is necessary to disrupt racial and national inequalities entwined within the fabric of British society.

In what follows, we draw on in-depth, repeat and longitudinal conversational interviews with Leave and Remain supporters across identities living in the South West of England that formed part of two larger projects exploring questions of identity, belonging and the role of the media in the face of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. ¹ To analyse our interlocutors’ Brexit biographies, we bring together influential approaches in the social sciences and humanities that consider media and political articulations of Brexit and Empire in the UK (Dorling & Tomlinson, 2019; Saunders, 2020; Valluvan & Kalra, 2019; Virdee & McGeever, 2018), and everyday manifestations of culture wars in the United States (Bhambra, 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 2019; Hochschild, 2016). Before turning our attention to the details of these respective frameworks, more detail is required on the polarising media and academic representations of Leavers’ and Remainers’ views on Empire and nationhood in the face of Brexit, and public debates about the legitimacy of statues commemorating enslavement and Empire in the UK.

Media and academic discourses on Brexit and Empire

Media commentators have often problematically drawn on the findings of social scientific survey-based research to explain the perceived divisions between Leavers and Remainers in the face of Brexit. For example, there is a widespread media narrative that deploys quantitative electoral and public opinion survey research to suggest that Leavers are likely to be disproportionately white, English, working-class and older generations of people, while Remainers are identified with the white middle-classes, migrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and younger generations of people (see, for example, Ford & Goodwin, 2017; Goodwin & Heath, 2016; Jennings & Stoker, 2016; see also Bhambra, 2017; Dorling, 2016; Flemmen & Savage, 2017; Mondon & Winter, 2019 for sociological critiques of this public narrative that we have discussed in detail in Tyler et al., 2022). Moreover, some Remain-orientated media commentators have depicted Leavers as nostalgic for a return to the British Empire that is identified with a ‘glorious past’ (Younge, 2018 cited in Saunders, 2020, p. 1141). Conversely, within these media depictions Remainers are often represented as critical of Leavers’ nostalgia for the imperial past, and so are thought to be more forward-looking in terms of their ideas of nationhood, multiculturalism and immigration.

It is in the face of these divisions which are believed to separate Leavers’ and Remainers’ identities and values that Koch (2017) reflects how, in the aftermath of the UK referendum on EU membership, think tanks interpreted the result as evidence of a ‘US-style culture war’ in Britain, driven by ‘identity-politics’ and ‘anti-immigrant sentiment’ (Stewart, 2016 cited in Koch, 2017, p. 226). In their survey and media research, Duffy et al. (2021) have scrutinised this image of cultural polarisation within British society, arguing that while the number of media articles in Britain focusing on ‘culture wars’ did dramatically increase between 2015 and 2020, ‘most people’ are either not particularly engaged with these issues, or they take a ‘middle position’. However, importantly for our focus on the representation of Leavers and Remainers within these debates, Duffy et al. (2021) suggest that Leavers and Remainers show considerable differences on issues such as whether the term ‘woke’ is regarded as a compliment or not. ² In this vein, Sobolewska and Ford (2020) have drawn on their public opinion survey findings to contend that racial, ethnic and class identities mediate Leavers’ and Remainers’ contrasting views on questions of racial diversity and immigration. Their supposition is that these identity-based divisions illustrate that there are ‘fundamental divisions’ in Britain over ‘identity and values’ that will shape the fabric of British political life for years to come (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020, p. 4). This argument is also reproduced within the mainstream media. For example, The Independent, a liberal-orientated newspaper, insisted in July 2022 that ‘Britain is destined to keep fighting over Brexit and culture wars’ because Brexit ‘illustrated our cultural divide’ (Hundal, 2022).

Turning to public debates on the legitimacy of statues linked to histories of colonialism and enslavement, some historians have referred to these as the ‘history wars’ (Donington, 2019), centred on ‘whose history is taught and whose history is . . . forgotten’ (Olusoga, 2020). The depth of anger and division surrounding this issue was not only exemplified by protests across Britain in the summer of 2020, but also by the tone of the discussion within traditional and social media. Reflecting on this, the Archbishop of Canterbury told the BBC:

We are in a time where culture and historic inherited culture is questioned very, very deeply . . . let’s ask the hard questions . . . But . . . let’s avoid saying that someone who disagrees with me is unfit to be called a human being . . . (BBC, 2021)

Furthermore, there is the assertion in some media reporting of the ‘history wars’ that white working-class conservative English people are more likely to support the legitimacy of statues celebrating slavery and colonialism, whereas more affluent mobile middle-class left-leaning white people and ethnic minorities are generally described as critical of such landmarks (see Gapud, 2020, on how identity was thought by the media to shape attitudes to statues in the English city of Bristol).

In the face of this identity-fuelled polarised discussion, it is worth reminding ourselves that the success of the Leave vote was dependent upon middle-class and elite support (Roth, 2018, p. 500). In this regard, sociologists report that two-thirds of the Leave vote represented a ‘significant cross-class coalition of middle-aged and older men and women’ (Virdee & McGeever, 2018, p. 1803). In this article, our aim is to add further complexity to media and social scientific accounts that portray British society as culturally divided post-the EU referendum. In so doing, we apply to the British context sociological critique of the culture war narrative in the United States advanced by Bonilla-Silva (2019) and Bhambra (2017) in the wake of Trump’s election. These sociologists argue that the culture war narrative problematically exonerates white middle-class liberals of racism by associating white working-class people with the election of Trump and ultimately ignoring the reproduction of systematic racism. Our contention is that the British media, political scientists’ and polling experts’ transposition of a similar racialised and classed narrative onto British people’s beliefs simplifies the ways in which racial and class inequalities are reproduced and challenged by Leavers and Remainers across identities. To trace the contours of this often unpredictable process we advance and develop the notion of ‘Brexit biographies’, the details of which we now turn to.

Theorising Brexit biographies and Empire

Our concept of Brexit biographies has in part been inspired by Hochschild’s (2016) biographical approach to interpreting what she calls ‘the deep story’ of the white ‘American right’ through the ‘keyhole’ issue of pollution. Hochschild’s (2016) study sets out to explain the views of the white working-class conservative ‘right’ in the face of the historically entrenched ‘culture wars’ in the United States. To do this, she draws on the biographies of white working-class Tea Party supporters who live in a rural town in Louisiana. Hochschild explores in detail the biographies of individual white working-class men and women, including their reflections on their working and family relationships, Christian beliefs, and sense of what is ‘fair’, as well as their views on what it means to belong to their town and to the American nation. She explains the sharp distinction between her white working-class participants’ rural worldviews and those of white middle-class urban liberal Americans on the left, like herself. In this regard, Hochschild’s (2016) aim is to climb over what she identifies as the ‘empathy wall’, that she suggests is ‘an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs to our own’ (p. 5). By climbing over this ‘empathy wall’, Hochschild (2016) came to see ‘others from the outside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics’ (p. 5). From this standpoint, Hochschild (2016) realised, ‘that the Tea Party was not so much an official political group as a culture, a way of seeing and feeling about a place and its people’ (p. 19).

In our analysis of our interlocutors’ Brexit biographies, we follow Hochschild’s approach by exploring how and when Leave and Remain individuals think about Brexit and Empire they evoke their family relationships, reflections on their childhoods and upbringing, their experiences of education, work, migration and of living in the seaside towns and rural villages of the South West of England. Notwithstanding the influence of Hochschild’s study on our approach, we also set out to avoid Bonilla-Silva’s (2019) and Bhambra’s (2017) critique of Hochschild’s work. As we briefly outlined above, these sociologists both contend that Hochschild’s study offers an apology for racism, by reinforcing the problematic idea that American society is culturally divided between ‘racist’ worldviews of conservative working-class whites and those values held by the supposedly more cosmopolitan, non-racist, liberal, white middle-classes. From this standpoint, Bonilla-Silva (2019) and Bhambra (2017) each argue that Hochschild’s analysis both absolves the white liberal middle-classes of racism, and ‘asks for empathy’ for white working-class people’s racism on the grounds that they are unable to keep a pace with transformations intrinsic to contemporary society (Bonilla-Silva, 2019, p. 19). To ensure that we avoid these criticisms in our analysis of our interlocutors’ narratives in England, we combine Hochschild’s biographical approach with sociologists’, human geographers’ and historians’ deployment of Gilroy’s (2004) concept of ‘postcolonial melancholia’ in their deconstruction of Brexit (Dorling & Tomlinson, 2019; Saunders, 2020; Valluvan & Kalra, 2019; Virdee & McGeever, 2018).

Postcolonial scholars examine how the Leave campaigns, and related political and media discourses, were underpinned by ‘melancholia’, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘longing’ for the colonial past (Dorling & Tomlinson 2019; Valluvan & Kalra, 2019; Virdee & McGeever, 2018). It is argued by these scholars that this nostalgia for and glorification of the colonial past supports the reproduction of racist and hierarchical notions of colonial difference in the present (Virdee & McGeever, 2018). This serves to other and exclude from the nation EU citizens who become a target for anti-immigrant, racist and xenophobic sentiment that has long since been directed at racialised minorities (Valluvan & Kalra, 2019). The mobilisation of the concept of postcolonial melancholia to explain the Brexit vote is summarised by Dorling and Tomlinson (2019, book blurb) as follows:

The vote to Leave . . . was the last gasp of the old empire working its way out of the British psyche. Fuelled by a misplaced nostalgia, the result was driven by a lack of knowledge of Britain’s imperial history, by a profound anxiety about British status today, and by a deeply unrealistic vision of our future.

Valluvan and Kalra (2019, p. 2408) also suggest this melancholic worldview facilitates an emotional sense of ‘loss, mourning, solace and . . . hubris’ in Leavers’ discourses on Brexit. Similarly, Virdee and McGeever (2018, p. 1805) argue that ‘Brexit draws on deep reservoirs of imperial longing in the majority population’ that reinforces Islamophobic, xenophobic and racist attitudes towards racialised minorities and migrants. Saunders (2020) develops this postcolonial approach by shifting the emphasis away from Leave narratives of Brexit to explore how ideas of coloniality are articulated in both Leave and Remain political and media discourses. In this article, we advance these postcolonial scholars’ analysis of political and media discourses by drawing on the thoughts and reflections of our interlocutors and positioning their views within their lived experiences and biographies.

To do this, we explore the ways in which Remainers and Leavers mobilise their biographies to produce contrasting evocations of colonial histories and nationhood that could be interpreted as evidence of cultural and political divisions separating Leavers’ regressive and Remainers’ progressive views, akin to the divisions that Hochschild (2016) observes in the United States, and that some political scientists and media commentators argue exist in the UK. However, in stark contrast to that analysis, we illustrate how our interlocutors’ differing views do not map neatly onto distinct racialised, classed, migrant, national and place-based identities and experiences. Crucially, by moving our discussions with our interlocutors away from Brexit to explore with some of the same individuals their views on the disputed legitimacy of statues identified with histories of Empire and enslavement, we bring to the fore similarities in Leavers’ and Remainers’ inclusive and exclusive racialised articulations of Empire and nationhood. In this way, our analysis does not privilege a fixed moment in time and take what our interlocutors say at face value, as does Hochschild’s realist position in the United States, and which some political scientists and the media’s commentary on Brexit Britain have done. But before progressing to the details of our findings, we introduce our fieldwork site, after which we reflect on our methodology.

Brexit biographies situated in the rural South West of England

The South West, also popularly known as ‘the West Country’, is a largely rural region that is the home to both seaside towns and agricultural villages. The rurality of this place is self-evident by the way in which the city where some of our interlocutors live is surrounded from every direction by countryside. Indeed, horse boxes and tractors intermittently pass through the city’s centre and its suburbs. Traditionally the main industries in this region were tin, copper and arsenic mining, ball clay and granite extraction, fishing and agriculture. The latter two of which persist today. This area is also known for its coastline, making tourism a significant industry.

The region’s population profile is predominantly white British with emerging populations of ethnic, racial and national diversity in the city, especially evident in some workplaces, schools and neighbourhoods. This emerging diversity in the city is not mirrored in the rural areas, which remain predominantly white British. But yet, this region has a deep multiracial history. The most obvious example is the region’s 400 years’ connection with the international network of exploitation and transportation that constituted the Atlantic slave trade and the British Empire (Gray, 2007; Richardson, 2005; Walvin, 2017). Ships sailed to Africa, America and South America from the West Country ports of Bristol (the hub of the slave trade in the South West), Plymouth, Exeter and smaller ports across the region (Gray, 2007; Richardson, 2005; Walvin, 2017). These ships carried goods from the local area, other parts of Europe and the wider British Empire that were exchanged for enslaved Africans (Gray, 2007). Like Britain as a whole, slavery and Empire were integral to the formation of everyday life in the South West, and their legacy surrounds its residents today in commonplace objects and buildings inscribed on the region’s landscape (Walvin, 2017). For example, many of the area’s rural stately homes and large grand urban houses were built with money earned through slavery and Empire (Walvin, 2017). Indeed, while many imperialists came from the South West, others that were not originally from the region settled in or brought second homes in the coastal towns and villages of the West Country in the nineteenth century, drawn to living in a place with a relatively warm climate (Gray, 2007). These histories of Empire and enslavement are also flagged in the naming of streets and pubs, as well as by the presence of statues that commemorate the masters of slavery and Empire.

Knowles (2008) argues in her account of articulations of coloniality, rurality, class and whiteness in the South West in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that Empire is ‘part of the bodies and habits of those who live’ there (p. 173). To illustrate this, Knowles interviewed white British high-ranking colonial administrators and their wives who retired to a rural village in South Devon. She argues that these colonialists were attracted to this place because the rural and white middle-upper-class English ‘structure of feeling’ of this locale resonated with their experiences in the colonies (Knowles, 2008, p. 168). This white British classed sensibility and disposition were evident in the ways that these former white colonisers treated their white English working-class domestic help with the same patronising paternal and dismissive attitude that they treated their non-white servants in the colonies (Knowles, 2008, p. 178).

From this standpoint, the classed Other that features in our white working- and middle-class interlocuters’ Brexit biographies is not the ‘white working-class’ ‘left behind’ Other that often figures in public discourses about Brexit (Bhambra, 2017; Mondon & Winter, 2019); it is the white, English, rural, middle-to-upper-middle-classes that are objectified in our interlocutors’ accounts. This should not be surprising given the association in public discourse of the Leave vote with rural areas of England (Neal et al., 2021), places that are often identified in popular discourse with white conservative middle-class English populations and values (Neal & Agyeman, 2006; Tyler, 2012).

Methodological reflections

Following Hochschild’s (2016, p. 18) method of describing in detail the lives, relationships, experiences and thoughts of a small number of individuals from a specific place who came to ‘illustrate particular patterns especially well’, we focus in detail on the testimonies of seven interlocutors out of a total of 60 participants who live in the South West. We have chosen to include here people whose biographies illustrate particularly well the individual nuances informing Leavers’ and Remainers’ place-based views on Brexit, Empire, slavery and nationhood.

Tyler conducted the interviews and fieldwork in the South West that we draw upon in this article. In the interviews, Tyler asked her interlocutors about their sense of belonging to the South West, the nation and the EU. She also asked them how they voted in the referendum and their views on politics, the media and current affairs, including their opinions on the legitimacy of statues that memorialise histories of enslavement and colonialism. Tyler did not explicitly raise the issue of Empire when discussing Brexit; rather, the colonial surfaced organically as a framing for Brexit during a significant number of her interviews. All interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim and lasted between one and two hours.

As we have indicated, Tyler spoke to most of the individuals that feature in this article at different moments in time. The first interviews formed part of an interdisciplinary project that explored how people’s identities, experiences of local and national belonging and media practices informed their views on Brexit (see endnote 1). The fieldwork that we draw on in this article was conducted between October 2018 and 31 January 2020 when the UK Parliament was fiercely debating the terms and conditions upon which Britain should leave the EU. These interviews took place in various locations including interlocutors’ homes, a relative’s home, or a cafe, and were situated within wider fieldwork relationships (see Tyler et al., 2022). The second interviews deployed in this article were conducted between October 2020 and April 2021 with 30 of the original 60 participants. This phase of fieldwork formed part of a project that developed our research on Brexit to explore everyday experiences of identity, inequalities and the media in the face of both Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic (see endnote 1). This period of fieldwork was conducted after the UK had officially left the EU and was at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, including two lockdowns. The second interviews were also conducted against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter inspired public debates and protests on the legitimacy of statues commemorating British histories of colonialism and enslavement. To comply with social distancing restrictions, these second interviews were held online (see Tyler et al., 2025, for a fuller discussion of our methodology).

During her interviews, Tyler found that even when she viscerally disagreed with their nationalist and racist views, as well as their views on Brexit, she was able to build positive relationships with all her interlocutors’ across Remain and Leave positionalities, classed, migrant, national and racialised identities. She did this in a context-dependent fashion by evoking shared aspects of her identity and Brexit biography, and suppressing others, to create a feeling of rapport. For example, when relevant during the interviews, Tyler called upon her Remain and anti-racist views, her professional, female, middle-class, white and English identity, as well as her experiences of parenting and family life, and of living in her fieldwork site and elsewhere in the UK. Indeed, the way in which Tyler was able to connect with her interlocuters forms a contrast to Hochschild (2016, p. 5), who describes how she climbed over ‘empathy walls’ to build rapport with her participants who had radically different beliefs and classed identities to her own. In this regard, Tyler did not straightforwardly experience and see ‘others from the outside’ as Hochschild did; rather she experienced and felt personal connections as an insider with aspects of her interlocutors’ identities, experiences and biographies. It is on the details of her Remain interlocutors’ narratives that we now focus.

Remainers’ Brexit biographies

Maria

Maria is in her forties, white and middle-class. ³ She supports Remain but could not vote in the referendum because she is an Italian citizen. Maria has lived in the South West for 18 years having migrated from Italy to a village in the area. Sitting one afternoon in a cafe, she explained to Tyler why she thinks that the white English rural people from the region, to whom she teaches Italian, voted to Leave the EU:

I see a return to imperialist Britain . . . [Some British people think that] we keep this power economically and politically . . . and . . . we make business . . . with . . . countries but we keep the power . . . It’s imperialist . . . There are lots of people especially in the most rural areas that retain that memory or did retain that power that want to return to that, and that’s the reason why they are supporting Brexit because they think that . . . Britain will be stronger again . . . A lot of my students come from that background . . . some of them would consider themselves liberals . . . We’re talking about people . . . in their sixties, seventies, and they have been to Europe a lot of times . . . They are very educated . . . and what happens when they come to Italy with me . . . They are feeling superior . . . They don’t . . . completely come to terms with the fact that . . . in Italy we . . . don’t drink tea in the morning . . . They can’t believe it . . . And . . . going back to Brexit, that is the return in believing that they are on the right side and everything else has got to be in their service, in their favour . . .

Maria’s perception of Leave voters is not only informed by her experience of teaching Italian to English rural residents but also by her biographical experience of living in the countryside. In this vein, Maria described how when she first migrated to England from Italy, she sometimes felt culturally awkward in her interactions with her white English rural neighbours. Moreover, echoing Knowles’ (2008) analysis of the racialised and classed disposition of cultural superiority of former colonial administrators, Maria identifies the rurality of this place with white English middle-to-upper-middle-class Leave voters, and her experience of their colonial attitude of superiority towards herself, other Italians and other Europeans. Maria’s reflections also echo Remain-orientated media and intellectual commentators’ assertion that the Leave vote was motivated by a belief that ‘by virtue of its Empire’ Britain should ‘rightfully exert’ in the present ‘international authority and influence’ centred on trade (Turner, 2019, cited in Saunders, 2020, p. 1160). As Saunders (2020, p. 1154) argues, such a belief is dependent upon ‘a memory of British greatness’ that becomes detached from the ‘sinews of imperial power’. For Maria, this Leave worldview supports a white middle-class rural English attitude and experience of cultural and national superiority towards ‘select foreign peoples’ including white Europeans like herself (Valluvan & Kalra, 2019, p. 2395).

Arthur

Consider next the ways in which Arthur, who voted Remain, also thinks that Brexit is the outcome of the white British upper-middle-classes’ support for Leave. Arthur is white, English, working-class and in his seventies. Arthur’s family moved to the rural seaside town where he lives from the north of England when he was a young child. He and his wife have brought up their children in this town, and Arthur identifies as coming from this region. Arthur is retired from his work as a skilled manual worker. Sitting at his daughter’s dining table, Arthur told Tyler:

I do think in this country there haven’t been any great effort made to feel European . . . because we still, it’s ‘them foreigners’ . . . I’m afraid, it’s the British Raj, it’s the Empire, [it] still lingers on in the psyche . . . I . . . think certainly the politicians . . . that . . . have got the Raj mentality they still think that . . . when we, a third of the world was red [a reference to maps that marked the British Empire in red], . . . a lot of them went to public school [a type of fee-paying school associated with the white upper-middle-classes], and what worse place to foster that attitude than in public schools, where they’ve got rows of honour for the ones that fell at the Indian mutiny [a major uprising in India in 1857–8 against the rule of the British] . . . And it’s still that attitude of when we were, when we ruled the world, we were in charge it was all better then . . .

Dorling and Tomlinson (2019), like Arthur, make connections between education, Empire, class and the Leave vote. Dorling and Tomlinson (2019) highlight that many politicians who supported the Leave campaign attended public schools that are ‘very successful at giving its pupils a sense of “effortless superiority”’ (p. 238). According to Dorling and Tomlinson (2019), this ‘elitist education system’ supports ‘myths and nostalgia’ about the imperial past by extolling ‘military patriotism, heroic deeds and public service’ (p. 10) that are interwoven with racialised ideals of Britishness and whiteness. Arthur’s similar emphasis on education, the ‘Raj mentality’ and class to account for the Leave vote is explained by his own biographical experiences of education and class inequality growing up in this predominantly white seaside town. Arthur described his resentment and regret that his family’s working-class position in the town’s social hierarchy meant he did not have the cultural know-how needed to pass the examination taken at 11 years old to go to a selective state-funded ‘grammar’ school that would have prepared him for university. Unlike the white middle-class children in the town, he attended a secondary modern school that equipped him for manual work.

Sophie

Like Maria and Arthur, Sophie’s interpretation of the referendum result is inseparable from her biographical experiences of inequality in England and the rural South West. Sophie is a white middle-class woman in her sixties, who voted Remain. Her mother was English and white upper-middle-class and her father was a Jewish refugee from Eastern Europe. Sophie was born in England, but her family emigrated to a former British colony when she was a young child. Sophie returned to England in her thirties and has lived in the South West for some 20 years. She describes the village where she resides as a ‘tolerant’ place for her and her partner to live as a gay couple: ‘We knew that . . . we weren’t going to get that homophobia . . . even though . . . a lot of people are . . . right-wing.’ Sophie also discussed how her neighbours responded to the EU referendum, and how this affected her partner, who is a white EU citizen:

‘We have too many migrants . . . something . . . had to be done about that didn’t it?’. . . People going round in the village . . . saying: ‘Vote Leave . . . Vote Leave . . .’ The morning of the result the peeping cars through the village . . . I was saying: . . . ‘this affects my partner’ . . . And they look at you blankly like ‘. . .we didn’t mean them’.

Elaborating on why she supported Remain, Sophie drew on the trope of Empire as follows:

When I first arrived in England . . . I thought . . . this country is in the death throes of Empire . . . Because I found a British person from the bottom . . . class in England . . . would patronise me [for being from the former colonies] . . . [It is] innate superiority . . . in the English psyche . . . Then the referendum happened, and I thought . . . we’re now in the dementia stage of Empire . . . It’s like short-term memory gone, last forty-five years – gone, you know living in the past . . . and hostile . . . So, it’s still very much . . . in the English psyche all that history of the class system and the inherited innate superior[ity] . . . of like you can see it with Rees-Mogg [white wealthy upper-middle-class Leave politician] . . . It’s . . . the entitlement to rule . . . That it is about protecting . . . the extreme obscene wealth of this elite . . .

Clearly, Sophie’s, Arthur’s and Maria’s views are shaped by their respective biographies of inequality in this rural white English place, based upon their differing minoritised experiences of migrating from the EU (Maria) or the former British colonies (Sophie) to the countryside, being the partner of an EU migrant (Sophie), and growing up working-class in a rural coastal town (Arthur). These interlocutors’ experiences of the white English rural social geography of this place are informed by their minority class, national and migrant identities, which implicitly centre white middle-class Englishness as the racially unmarked norm (see Frankenberg, 1993 for an analysis of white racial identity as the ‘invisible’ norm). Moreover, drawing on their place-based experiences of class, national and migrant inequalities, these interlocutors each emphasise what they perceive to be the continuity between the xenophobic and racist imperial national past and the racially white English and middle-to-upper-middle-class constitution of the Leave vote. In this way, their shared Remain position can easily be interpreted as politically progressive with regard to their explicit reflections on questions of class distinctions, migration, Brexit, Empire and nationhood.

Leavers’ Brexit biographies

Clive and Dorothy

We turn now to Leavers Clive and Dorothy, a white English married couple in their sixties. In contrast to our Remainers’ biographically embedded and place-based critiques of what they perceive to be the imperial worldview of Leavers, Clive and Dorothy evoked racialised and classed images and icons of rurality and Empire to articulate why they voted for Brexit. Clive is a retired ‘TV repair man’. Dorothy described herself as a ‘housewife’. Clive and Dorothy cannot think of anywhere else outside of the rural South West that generations of their families have come from. In class terms, Clive describes himself and his family as ‘working-class’, explaining that he is from a ‘very poor’ background, while Dorothy is from a farming family and does not like the label ‘working-class’. Sitting at their dining table, Dorothy and Clive explained to Tyler how in 1975 when the British government called a referendum on whether the UK should stay in ‘the European Community’ (as the EU was known then), they voted to Leave. Dorothy reflected:

We’d been to France and Spain around that . . . time, and we could see how . . . we could never be part of a culture that was so . . . different . . . In England we’ve got . . . lower-class, middle-class, upper-class; in Spain and France you’ve got the lower-class and . . . the upper-class, there isn’t anything in the middle . . .

Clive and Dorothy’s thoughts on the cultural differences that they believe differentiate British society from other European countries resurfaced in our discussion of a recent holiday that they took to India as follows:

Clive:

We . . . were sitting . . . on the lawn of this ex-Governor’s house . . . just like the Raj and [we thought] Jesus Christ.

Dorothy:

This is wrong . . .

Clive:

But it’s a sensible order and we weren’t very fair to the Indians, but you like to think . . . we did a good job . . . And we organised stuff and we do things in a proper manner . . . The British are revered for calmness and considered . . . Britain is regulated, it’s reasonable, it’s safe, it’s no anarchy.

Katharine [Tyler]:

So, . . . why did you go to India . . .?

Dorothy:

We watched this programme on television ‘Indian Hill Railway’ . . .

Clive:

. . . the programme made a point of . . . all speaking English and it seemed like a friendly place to go. Whereas we go to France and we don’t find it friendly . . . or Germany . . . or Spain.

Clive and Dorothy’s reflections parallel pro-Leave politicians’ suggestions that Britain is more closely affiliated with the Commonwealth than Europe. For example, Nigel Farage, the architect of the non-official ‘Leave EU’ campaign, explained his preference for ‘our kith and kin in the Commonwealth’ rather than EU member states (Farage, 2016, cited in Saunders, 2020, p. 1146). While Clive and Dorothy express their discomfort at the thought that the British were not ‘fair’ to those colonised, they also identify Britishness with the supposedly timeless national characteristics of ‘order’, ‘calmness’, ‘consideration’, ‘regulation’, ‘reasonableness’, ‘safety’ and ‘no anarchy’, which take meaning and become racialised as white in relation to what they are not – Indianness. In this way, these white British values become set apart from the violent realities of imperial power and decolonisation.

Later in their conversation with Tyler, Clive and Dorothy associate these characteristics of Britishness with their own family’s values, including the racially white and middle-class culture of the rural seaside town that Clive is from:

Clive:

. . . And that town is like . . .

Dorothy:

The Raj . . .

Clive:

‘Gung ho’, and ‘dear boy’ and all that stuff.

Katharine [Tyler]:

Right, so when you say the ‘Raj’ you mean posh?

Clive:

Oh, yes . . . My guess . . . it’s probably my values that have come from living in that town where there was calm and tolerance . . .

Dorothy:

You knew your place.

Clive:

Revered. My mother was in service [e.g. worked as a servant] . . . There was an order . . .

For Clive, his mother’s ‘service’ to the white upper-middle-classes in this rural English seaside town facilitated an intimate relationship between herself and those she served, across ‘ordered’ class differences. The closeness of this interclass relationship informs Clive’s upbringing and values, as well as fostering his sense of connection to the British Empire and postcolonial India. It is also important to recognise that Clive and Dorothy cannot afford to buy a house in the rural town that Clive comes from, and so they live in a nearby seaside town that neither of them like as much. In this regard, Clive and Dorothy express a classed ‘nostalgia’ for Empire that is entangled with a ‘prettified’ memory of ‘pre-War colonial whiteness’ (Valluvan & Kalra, 2019), that eclipses their lived experiences of class inequalities in this place. In contrast, our white Remain interlocutors mobilise their rural place-based biographical experiences of class and migrant inequalities to articulate a critique of Empire, nationhood and the Leave vote.

Paul

Not everyone drew on the same imagery concerning the white upper-middle-class rural and imperial constitution of this place and nation. For example, consider Paul, a Leaver, who evokes his father’s status as a migrant to Britain from the former British colonies to explain his identification with the Commonwealth and not the EU. Paul is in his forties, mixed-race, and is a middle-class professional from a working-class background. He described how he has a ‘white British mother’, and his father is ‘ethnically Indian and a naturalised citizen of the United Kingdom’. Paul has lived for the last 10 years in a city in the South West. Reflecting on his decision to vote Leave he told Tyler:

All my family voted Leave . . . We all consider the Remain vote to be an overtly racist vote . . . And ’cos by now in practice we have an overtly racist immigration system where if you are from an EU country you can just walk in . . . no questions asked, and by coincidence you happen to be white because most Europeans are. Whereas, if you come from another part of the world like my cousins . . . they can’t come here because of very stringent conditions placed upon them because we do not have freedom of movement for people from the old colonial powers. So, to us the European Union is basically the . . . last hurrah of the old colonial powers entrenching their ill-gotten privileges at the expense of the rest of the world . . . Now Britain has a moral obligation, a historic obligation, because of its imperial past to the Commonwealth . . . And it has abrogated those responsibilities as it’s fallen . . . more integrated into the EU and . . . that’s a historic failing that needs to be corrected.

Resonating with the ways in which our white Remain interlocutors draw upon their diverse biographical experiences of class and migrant inequalities to critique Britain’s colonial past, Paul recalls his family’s experience of anti-immigrant racism to think about the continuity of imperial power and racism in the present. Significantly, unlike our white Remain interlocutors, he renders the whiteness of Europeans visible to critically reflect on what he understands to be the EU’s racist immigration policies. This illustrates how whiteness is visible to those it excludes, for example racialised minorities like Paul, but it is not always visible to white people who it privileges (Frankenberg, 1993). In this way, Paul does not share Clive and Dorothy’s nostalgia for Empire (as discussed above), but he does share their identification with the Commonwealth.

John

To give one further example of the differing ways in which our Leave interlocutors draw on their biographies and identities to articulate their reflections on Empire and Brexit, we now turn to John, who is a white middle-class English man in his seventies. He moved to a rural village in the South West 15 years ago to be a Christian vicar. To explain why he voted to Leave the EU, John draws on an ‘Orientalist’ discourse that represents Islam and Muslims as the ‘Other’ to the supposedly progressive ‘West’ (Said, 1978). John evokes this historically entrenched colonial discourse of religious difference to explain his fears regarding the free movement of people within the EU. In describing this concern, John recalls the movement of refugees from the Middle East to Germany in 2014–15 in the face of war in Syria. He says:

This is where my religious social studies comes in, because to see so many men leaving their families and coming was, it’s not surprising of Europeans to do, but it’s very surprising for Arab nation people to do that . . . I mean at its worst you could call it the Islamisation of Europe . . . So, . . . it could even be . . . that somewhere like Saudi Arabia says: ‘No . . . don’t come to us, you go and convert Europe to Islam’.

John’s views illustrate Virdee and McGeever’s (2018) observation that Islamophobic sentiments widely held in the UK after 9/11 offer an important context to explain the success of the vote Leave campaigns. However, John does not evoke these campaigns in expressing his views. Rather, his religious beliefs and education inform his worldview. On the one hand, John stresses his belief that black Christian migrants from Africa to Britain had strengthened the practice of Christianity in the UK in positive ways, and so he was not anti-immigration or against racial diversity. On the other hand, John does not understand the ways in which the migration of refugees from the Middle East to Europe is in part the outcome of European colonialism in the Middle East. The latter served over time to disrupt the socio-economic and political constitution and security of the Middle East, creating the conditions for contemporary migration (Virdee & McGeever, 2018). This lack of knowledge means that John’s account supports an Islamophobic image of Britishness and Europeanness as Christian and not ‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’. In this way, John draws on his religious beliefs to form a very different critique of EU immigration policies to that advocated by Paul above, who wants more diversity in the EU’s immigration policies and not less. Nonetheless, both men come to the same conclusion that Britain is better off outside of the EU rather than within it.

Let us pause for a moment to take stock of our argument thus far. Contrary to the arguments proposed by some political science and media commentators, our analysis highlights that there is no systematic classed, racialised, migrant and national identity-based pattern for differing articulations of Brexit, nationhood and Empire. Moreover, to categorise our Leave and Remain interlocutors’ views as straightforwardly progressive or regressive would be to ignore the ways in which individuals’ views are positioned within their biographical experiences of racial, ethnic, national, migrant and class inequalities and privileges. To illustrate these points further, we now turn our attention to how some of our interlocutors across Leave and Remain positions expressed similar sentiments on the legitimacy of statues identified with colonialism and enslaved histories that populate the local and national landscape.

The (il)legitimacy of statues linked to colonial and enslaved histories

Let us listen first to Maria’s and John’s views that such statues should be taken down. You will recall Maria is a white Italian migrant to the UK who supports Remain, and that John is a white Leave-voting retired vicar. During their online discussion at the height of the pandemic, Maria told Tyler her thoughts on a statue of a local military white man who led the British army in imperial wars:

I never liked that statue . . . we should absolutely get rid of it as a symbol . . . What is it doing there? . . . It might be a good idea to create a space where all these statues can end up and as a testimony of what happened, and not completely cancel them . . . as if they never existed.

During his online discussion with Tyler, John reflects on the toppling by force of Edward Colston’s statue by a crowd of anti-racist protestors, while the UK was in lockdown. Colston (1636–1721) is a well-known white British trader of enslaved people, who was based in Bristol, a city in the South West of England (see further Gapud, 2020). John says:

I would say our fathers [e.g. his and his wife’s], certainly mine . . . was a racist . . . I can remember comments about ‘how lazy they were’, and . . . ‘how . . . you couldn’t rely on them’ . . . [But] we murdered them in Kenya . . . the Mau Mau, dreadful [violent suppression by British authorities of an uprising by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army]. I mean we’re old enough to remember some horrendous things . . . Biafra was another one, horrendous [British massacre of civilians in Nigeria] . . . [Turning to] the statues . . . Colston in Bristol . . . he made vast amounts of money out of slavery, but he gave vast amounts of money away for maybe to salve his own conscience . . . His statue should still be in the sea . . . I just don’t think you can pay your way out of doing evil things . . .

What is significant here for our argument is that John, a staunch Leaver, agrees with Maria, a Remain supporter, that statues which memorialise histories of colonialism and enslavement should be taken down because their materiality encapsulates the temporal continuity of imperial power and violence that shapes contemporary Britishness. John’s emphasis on the continuities between his father’s racist attitudes and the British state massacres of those colonised, during his own lived experience of decolonisation, resonates with the ways in which our Leave (Paul) and Remain (Arthur, Maria and Sophie) interlocutors draw on their biographical experiences of inequalities to explain their understanding of the reproduction of imperial power in the present. What John does not do is connect his fears concerning the potential Islamification of Britain to the imperial and racist worldview that he associates with his father.

For an alternative perspective on what should happen to these statues consider Arthur’s, Dorothy’s and Clive’s views that they should remain in place. You will remember Arthur voted Remain because he felt that white upper-class Leave politicians wrongly identified with Empire. In stark contrast, Clive and Dorothy voted Leave because they value white upper-class British ways of being that they associate with Brexit and Empire. Turning to Arthur’s views on the statues, he explained during an online discussion with Tyler:

The thought that you can re-write history by moving a statue . . . is absolutely laughable . . . You cannot erase history . . . The West Country benefitted from slavery, there were all the ships going from the ports . . . West Country men took part in it, they all made money out of it . . . I don’t know how many of these . . . pulling down statues [think] . . . ‘oh, this is bloody good fun’ . . . And how much of it is actually . . . deep-rooted sympathy with black people in America, or black people as a whole. What experience have they got of it [e.g. racism]? . . . Who’s going to apologise for Brexit in . . . a hundred years? Or what they going to do . . . pull down a statue of Boris Johnson or Michael Gove [political advocates of the Leave campaign].

Similar sentiments on the perceived futility of removing the statues were expressed by Clive and Dorothy, as follows:

Dorothy:

. . . the whole thing was . . . utterly unacceptable it should not have been allowed . . . it was during lockdown . . . I mean why the hell they weren’t all of them [arrested for breaking lockdown rules], the Police just stood and watched them do it . . . Defacing a statue, I mean what happened years ago happened years ago, it’s history we cannot rewrite history.

Clive:

We cannot erase history, it’s dangerous . . . There’s just more anarchy that’s all. Brexit wasn’t anarchic in that way . . . Brexit was democratic, peaceful.

Despite their opposing views on Brexit and Empire, Clive, Dorothy and Arthur each draw on a discourse that ‘contains’ (Gapud, 2020) the slave past to ‘history’ and thus rendering it fixed in the past and so disconnected from contemporary manifestations and experiences of racism in Britain. Maria also thinks that the statues should not be ‘cancelled out . . . as if they never existed’. However, unlike Arthur, Dorothy and Clive, she believes that the haunting presence of these statues leftover from Empire and slavery has the potential to facilitate local, national and international conversations about the contemporary constitution of racism in Britain. From this point of view, Maria participated in the local Black Lives Matter protests because she wanted to learn what they illuminated about the continuity between histories of enslavement and contemporary formations of racism and xenophobia in the West Country, the UK and the United States.

Conclusion

In this article, we have set out to critique pervasive media discourses and survey-based social scientific studies’ deployment of a US-style culture war narrative to explain the supposedly polarised racialised and classed worldviews of Leavers and Remainers on questions of nationhood, Empire and histories of enslavement. We have focused our critical attention on how Leavers and Remainers that live in the South West of England mobilise images of the colonial and enslaved past when they think about Brexit and the legitimacy of statues that commemorate national histories of Empire and enslavement.

By tracing our Leave and Remain interlocutors’ Brexit biographies across time and differing contexts, we propose that Leavers’ and Remainers’ views of nationhood and Empire do not map neatly onto racialised, classed, national and migrant identities, as some media commentators and political scientists have argued. In this regard, we have focused on how our Leave and Remain interlocutors’ thoughts and reflections on Empire and nationhood shift and change over time and across differing contexts. Our contention is, then, that social scientists who study Brexit, and social polarisation more generally, must not take what their interlocutors say in a specific moment in time at face value, as some quantitative political scientists and qualitative sociologists have tended to do. From this standpoint, it is not a straightforward Hochschild-style ‘empathy wall’ (Hochschild, 2016, pp. 5–8) that our Remain interlocutors need to climb over to understand the ways in which our Leave interlocutors think about the historical and contemporary fabric of the British nation and/or the EU, and indeed vice versa.

Rather, our supposition is that emphasis upon the convergences and divergences within our Leave and Remain interlocutors’ views facilitates critical sociological insight into the reproduction of social inequalities and privileges within British society. On the one hand, some of our Leave and Remain interlocutors recall the imperial and enslaved past to articulate a ‘power evasive’ (Baker, 2025) nostalgic, glorification and purification of that past. This process of imperial hypermnesia supports the reproduction of racialised and classed inequalities in the present. While, on the other hand, in different times and contexts, some of the same people evoke the colonial and enslaved past to facilitate ‘power aware’ (Baker, 2025) reflections on how that past underpins contemporary racialised and classed inequalities. What truly matters sociologically here is how histories of Empire and enslavement are mobilised by individuals to either reaffirm racism and classed inequalities in the postcolonial present or to confront and challenge them. In other words, our argument is that rather than exclusively emphasising the differences that divide and polarise people across political, racialised, migrant and classed identities, social scientists should also focus on those moments in which individuals across social and political identities articulate power aware discourses on nationhood and racism. Crucially, detailed sociological attention to these moments sets the foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial future in Britain that cuts across social and political differences and identities.

To draw out these critical moments we have scrutinised how the everyday articulation of discourses that glorify and critique the imperial and enslaved pasts are embedded within individuals’ biographies, including their geographically situated experiences of migration, working, growing up and living in a predominantly white and rural region of the South West of England. From this biographically situated place-based perspective, the racialised and classed Other that features in our Leave and Remain interlocutors’ discourses is the white upper-middle-class elite, and not the white working-class ‘left behind’ who is the protagonist within mainstream media narratives of Brexit (Mondon & Winter, 2019). We have suggested that this ethnographic insight should not be surprising given the ways in which the rural in England is entwined with white middle-class values and identities (Knowles, 2008; Neal & Agyeman, 2006; Tyler, 2012). This finding also illuminates the wider sociological point that everyday racialised and classed experiences of Brexit are shaped by biographically informed senses of belonging to local places and the nation (see further Blamire et al., 2025; Degnen et al., 2023).

Finally, it is worth highlighting that social and traditional media are a key driver of the culture wars narrative in post-Brexit Britain (Hall, 2025). Given this reality, social scientists that study questions of polarisation, identity and inequality must ensure that their work does not fuel this media narrative. This is imperative if we are to avoid the self-fulling prophecy of a culture war becoming a reality that shapes the rhythm and flow of everyday life in the UK.