This is one of the sharpest readings of Brexit I have seen, precisely because it does not reduce the event to economics, xenophobia, or propaganda alone.
The “imperial filing system” is the key insight here. Brexit was not only a reaction to immigration; it was a reaction to a category failure. Eastern Europeans were close enough to disturb the British assumption of civilisational proximity, but unfamiliar enough not to fit the old imperial hierarchy. They were not “foreign” in the colonial sense, yet not comfortably “same” either. That made them symbolically disruptive.
What followed was a political redirection of decline. Post-2008 anger needed an object, and the migrant became the most convenient surface onto which deeper failures could be projected: wage stagnation, housing pressure, institutional fatigue, productivity weakness, and elite evasion. The tragedy is that Brexit answered a structural problem with a symbolic gesture. It restored a feeling of control while weakening many of the systems through which control is actually exercised.
The Eastern European worker, nurse, engineer, builder, or student was never the real wound. They were, in many ways, evidence of a society still capable of attracting ambition. The deeper wound was that Britain had lost confidence in its own ladder — and then blamed those who were still climbing it.
Excellent piece. The value here is not in taking a side, but in exposing the architecture of misrecognition behind the vote.
The imperial filing system is a brilliant frame, really well-written.
One thing I'd add is that the Brexit campaigns knew the technicality of "European" migration wouldn't move people on its own, so they blurred it. Farage's "Breaking Point" poster wasn't a queue of Poles, it was non-white refugees, and much of the messaging leaned on brown and Muslim faces while the actual policy was about Brussels.
Plenty voted expecting Brexit to mean fewer immigrants (mainly brown or muslim) full stop, not fewer Europeans, because that's precisely what the imagery was built to imply. The real target hid behind a face it knew would sell.
Hence why post-Brexit, as successive governments (Conservatives) have worsened the migration crisis no doubt, the result has been that immigration has continued to rise, except this time we receive more refugees than we did European immigrants. That isn't a defence of the current immigration crisis that the Conservatives set into play either.
All things aside, exiting a trade bloc with your largest trading partner was a mystical decision for me. Of course, a lot of the talk remained to be about immigration as it garnered the most clicks for the Data Scientists working tirelessly to swing our votes.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, the immigration debate has already shifted towards non-European immigrants, but it was the Eastern European one that ignited the debate years before the referendum took place.
Reading British media in the 2000s was surreal - you’d think Eastern Europeans were the Huns, invading Britain or something. The panic started there and then - following the refugee crisis of the Syrian war - it shifted gears.
Funny how the "enemy" continues to change, depending on political convenience, usually peddled through media-driven language and propaganda - yet those of us in the UK become poorer day by day while the same people peddling the propaganda become richer, shareholders become wealthier; supermarkets, utility companies, insurance firms all squeezing out record profits whilst we're told public funding is stretched thin due to immigration. Laughable. Mind you, not as laughable as the people falling for it.
Your point re: the shifting of gears is spot on as well. That last decade seems to have been a test in hindsight - testing the waters to see what sticks, what ignites a reaction people and what does not. A common enemy, an "invasion", usually does the trick.
Much of the time the same Brits that wanted to persecute the Eastern Europeans in the 2000s, and the Muslims today, cite "patriotism" and "protecting Christian values" as their driving force.
Although the majority of these tend to be those who have never once served their communities, their churches, food banks, youth clubs, police forces or wanted to fight for their country in the army as they claim they want to do in the streets. But hey, vote Leave and we'll all be richer they said!
Please correct me If I am wrong. Didn’t the brown or muslim come from Britain’s colonies and later from commonwealth? In particular the soldiers from Pakistan and Nepal were sought after assets.
In Canada we have two separatist movements - one in Alberta driven by right wingers who want a white Christian petro-state (and keep all the oil money to themselves) and one in Quebec - who want to expunge the English residents from a desired pure Francophone culture.
Quebec has basically driven most of the English speaking population out of the province over the last 35 or so years as the politics are driven by a desire for a French nation state.
However the unintended consequence has been to increase the ethnic make-up of the province as they absorb more and more immigrants from Arab and African French speaking countries (Quebec can legally prefer French speaking immigrants over non-French speaking).
As a Hungarian immigrant to Canada (whose parents decided to settle in Montreal for some reason - instead of Toronto) I learnt English first and French later but I soon learnt that being bilingual was not enough to the French purity people - the separatist propaganda over the years had made me a stranger in what had become a strange land.
My company moved everyone out of their Montreal HQ to Toronto (where I now live). It is estimated that Quebec lost 30-40,000 direct jobs over time due their language laws and Montreal has not regained its former glory as the economic centre of Canada.
The Alberta movement is a joke compared to what Quebec has done through language separation.
The separatist movements in Canada are something I’m only vaguely familiar with, so you gave me some genuinely useful insight I wasn’t aware of. Thank you for that.
The Alberta separatists do sound like a joke, honestly. From the little I knew, I never took them particularly seriously because the premise always struck me as ridiculous.
Quebec is more interesting to me. I am intimately familiar with French pride - and the low-key sense of cultural supremacy that often comes with it - so it’s fascinating to hear first-hand from someone who has seen what the Quebec movement actually does in practice.
What these movements seem to misunderstand is that the New World - Canada and the United States especially - was built on a very different social contract from Europe. People went there for liberty, peace, and the pursuit of prosperity. That was the promise: live freely, build a life, and prosper economically.
That is why nationalism is so destructive there. It is not exactly a net positive in Europe either, even in older ethno-national states, but at least in Europe it has deeper historical roots. In North America, it feels fundamentally out of place. Those societies were not built to be nationalist projects. They were built as civic projects.
Excellent! I am neither British or eastern European, or even EU for that matter. But as a US citizen who is baffled by our own immigration muddle, I appreciate an honest explication of the many threads and multiple facets of the conundrum that are addressed.
To be fair, the Anglosphere does seem to have similar problems, and ironically - would reach for similar solutions to said problems. Isolationism as a means to battle immigration seems to be the new trend. The final result being that if one can make his state unappealing enough, immigration kind of sorts itself out.
A lot of what you say applied to the Irish a generation earlier. It's bizarre seeing interviews with people in Britain in the 80s rolling out racist and tired tropes about the Irish that seem so far beyond the pale today.
A few years ago a friend and I cycled in a series of outings from Estonia to the Black Sea, all the way through Eastern Europe. Both passionate Europhiles but realised how little we knew about Eastern Europe, despite having had large populations of Poles for instance, resident in the UK for decades. It was a great education and both of us read widely at the time on the subject. The British are probably more aware of the wider world than most, partly because of their colonial, outward looking history, but with a big gap where Eastern Europe is concerned. But Id still argue that London is the most multi cultural city on the planet and remarkably tolerant.
Meanwhile the largest example of colonialism and imperialism continues with its expansionist ambitions. Russia.
I can't stand reading about it anymore. It is such nonsense.
1. It concerns trade classifications for salad cucumbers.
2. Cucumbers are processed by machine in hospitals, university dining halls, and workplace canteens, and for this process, the cucumbers cannot be too curved.
3. That is why representatives of agricultural organizations and wholesalers ensured that the degree of cucumber curvature became part of the trade classification.
4. The curvature standard for cucumbers hasn't existed for years, because—thanks to selective breeding—curved cucumbers no longer exist.
The rules the EU adopts do not simply fall from the sky, nor are they dreamed up by "Eurocrats." They are the result of years of negotiations between member states aimed at establishing a common market with shared standards.
If I buy tiles from Italy or Spain, I cannot rely on Italian or Spanish standards—I am not even familiar with them.
If I buy a shower unit from France, I need to be certain that it will work with my Swedish gas water heater.
This is one of the sharpest readings of Brexit I have seen, precisely because it does not reduce the event to economics, xenophobia, or propaganda alone.
The “imperial filing system” is the key insight here. Brexit was not only a reaction to immigration; it was a reaction to a category failure. Eastern Europeans were close enough to disturb the British assumption of civilisational proximity, but unfamiliar enough not to fit the old imperial hierarchy. They were not “foreign” in the colonial sense, yet not comfortably “same” either. That made them symbolically disruptive.
What followed was a political redirection of decline. Post-2008 anger needed an object, and the migrant became the most convenient surface onto which deeper failures could be projected: wage stagnation, housing pressure, institutional fatigue, productivity weakness, and elite evasion. The tragedy is that Brexit answered a structural problem with a symbolic gesture. It restored a feeling of control while weakening many of the systems through which control is actually exercised.
The Eastern European worker, nurse, engineer, builder, or student was never the real wound. They were, in many ways, evidence of a society still capable of attracting ambition. The deeper wound was that Britain had lost confidence in its own ladder — and then blamed those who were still climbing it.
Excellent piece. The value here is not in taking a side, but in exposing the architecture of misrecognition behind the vote.
The imperial filing system is a brilliant frame, really well-written.
One thing I'd add is that the Brexit campaigns knew the technicality of "European" migration wouldn't move people on its own, so they blurred it. Farage's "Breaking Point" poster wasn't a queue of Poles, it was non-white refugees, and much of the messaging leaned on brown and Muslim faces while the actual policy was about Brussels.
Plenty voted expecting Brexit to mean fewer immigrants (mainly brown or muslim) full stop, not fewer Europeans, because that's precisely what the imagery was built to imply. The real target hid behind a face it knew would sell.
Hence why post-Brexit, as successive governments (Conservatives) have worsened the migration crisis no doubt, the result has been that immigration has continued to rise, except this time we receive more refugees than we did European immigrants. That isn't a defence of the current immigration crisis that the Conservatives set into play either.
All things aside, exiting a trade bloc with your largest trading partner was a mystical decision for me. Of course, a lot of the talk remained to be about immigration as it garnered the most clicks for the Data Scientists working tirelessly to swing our votes.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, the immigration debate has already shifted towards non-European immigrants, but it was the Eastern European one that ignited the debate years before the referendum took place.
Reading British media in the 2000s was surreal - you’d think Eastern Europeans were the Huns, invading Britain or something. The panic started there and then - following the refugee crisis of the Syrian war - it shifted gears.
Nail on the head there, I couldn't agree more.
Funny how the "enemy" continues to change, depending on political convenience, usually peddled through media-driven language and propaganda - yet those of us in the UK become poorer day by day while the same people peddling the propaganda become richer, shareholders become wealthier; supermarkets, utility companies, insurance firms all squeezing out record profits whilst we're told public funding is stretched thin due to immigration. Laughable. Mind you, not as laughable as the people falling for it.
Your point re: the shifting of gears is spot on as well. That last decade seems to have been a test in hindsight - testing the waters to see what sticks, what ignites a reaction people and what does not. A common enemy, an "invasion", usually does the trick.
Much of the time the same Brits that wanted to persecute the Eastern Europeans in the 2000s, and the Muslims today, cite "patriotism" and "protecting Christian values" as their driving force.
Although the majority of these tend to be those who have never once served their communities, their churches, food banks, youth clubs, police forces or wanted to fight for their country in the army as they claim they want to do in the streets. But hey, vote Leave and we'll all be richer they said!
Please correct me If I am wrong. Didn’t the brown or muslim come from Britain’s colonies and later from commonwealth? In particular the soldiers from Pakistan and Nepal were sought after assets.
Great piece. I couldn’t agree more. The mechanism described essentially applies to Germany as well.
Germany too? 🤔
In Canada we have two separatist movements - one in Alberta driven by right wingers who want a white Christian petro-state (and keep all the oil money to themselves) and one in Quebec - who want to expunge the English residents from a desired pure Francophone culture.
Quebec has basically driven most of the English speaking population out of the province over the last 35 or so years as the politics are driven by a desire for a French nation state.
However the unintended consequence has been to increase the ethnic make-up of the province as they absorb more and more immigrants from Arab and African French speaking countries (Quebec can legally prefer French speaking immigrants over non-French speaking).
As a Hungarian immigrant to Canada (whose parents decided to settle in Montreal for some reason - instead of Toronto) I learnt English first and French later but I soon learnt that being bilingual was not enough to the French purity people - the separatist propaganda over the years had made me a stranger in what had become a strange land.
My company moved everyone out of their Montreal HQ to Toronto (where I now live). It is estimated that Quebec lost 30-40,000 direct jobs over time due their language laws and Montreal has not regained its former glory as the economic centre of Canada.
The Alberta movement is a joke compared to what Quebec has done through language separation.
The separatist movements in Canada are something I’m only vaguely familiar with, so you gave me some genuinely useful insight I wasn’t aware of. Thank you for that.
The Alberta separatists do sound like a joke, honestly. From the little I knew, I never took them particularly seriously because the premise always struck me as ridiculous.
Quebec is more interesting to me. I am intimately familiar with French pride - and the low-key sense of cultural supremacy that often comes with it - so it’s fascinating to hear first-hand from someone who has seen what the Quebec movement actually does in practice.
What these movements seem to misunderstand is that the New World - Canada and the United States especially - was built on a very different social contract from Europe. People went there for liberty, peace, and the pursuit of prosperity. That was the promise: live freely, build a life, and prosper economically.
That is why nationalism is so destructive there. It is not exactly a net positive in Europe either, even in older ethno-national states, but at least in Europe it has deeper historical roots. In North America, it feels fundamentally out of place. Those societies were not built to be nationalist projects. They were built as civic projects.
Excellent! I am neither British or eastern European, or even EU for that matter. But as a US citizen who is baffled by our own immigration muddle, I appreciate an honest explication of the many threads and multiple facets of the conundrum that are addressed.
To be fair, the Anglosphere does seem to have similar problems, and ironically - would reach for similar solutions to said problems. Isolationism as a means to battle immigration seems to be the new trend. The final result being that if one can make his state unappealing enough, immigration kind of sorts itself out.
I am always delighted by your analysis and essays!
A lot of what you say applied to the Irish a generation earlier. It's bizarre seeing interviews with people in Britain in the 80s rolling out racist and tired tropes about the Irish that seem so far beyond the pale today.
2nd generation Pole in US. Your narrative is very familiar. Feels like I've been there, done that.
The hunger compounded as a credit cart interest… I have never heard a most fitting figure of speech for the central-eastern Europe mindset
A few years ago a friend and I cycled in a series of outings from Estonia to the Black Sea, all the way through Eastern Europe. Both passionate Europhiles but realised how little we knew about Eastern Europe, despite having had large populations of Poles for instance, resident in the UK for decades. It was a great education and both of us read widely at the time on the subject. The British are probably more aware of the wider world than most, partly because of their colonial, outward looking history, but with a big gap where Eastern Europe is concerned. But Id still argue that London is the most multi cultural city on the planet and remarkably tolerant.
Meanwhile the largest example of colonialism and imperialism continues with its expansionist ambitions. Russia.
The curvature of the banana.
I can't stand reading about it anymore. It is such nonsense.
1. It concerns trade classifications for salad cucumbers.
2. Cucumbers are processed by machine in hospitals, university dining halls, and workplace canteens, and for this process, the cucumbers cannot be too curved.
3. That is why representatives of agricultural organizations and wholesalers ensured that the degree of cucumber curvature became part of the trade classification.
4. The curvature standard for cucumbers hasn't existed for years, because—thanks to selective breeding—curved cucumbers no longer exist.
The rules the EU adopts do not simply fall from the sky, nor are they dreamed up by "Eurocrats." They are the result of years of negotiations between member states aimed at establishing a common market with shared standards.
If I buy tiles from Italy or Spain, I cannot rely on Italian or Spanish standards—I am not even familiar with them.
If I buy a shower unit from France, I need to be certain that it will work with my Swedish gas water heater.