'I Want My Country Back!': Equality, Discrimination and Xenophobia After the Referendum

Abstract

We’ve been asked to offer some personal reflections, hopefully mediated by scholarly insight, on the UK referendum vote on EU membership. The quotation in my title comes from the rallying cry of the “Leave” campaign. The resonance of that slogan with the claim of Donald Trump to “Make America Great Again” is telling, as both imply a nostalgia, or rather a fantasy, for a lost state: one which is fully “sovereign”, unfettered by international or supranational obligations, freed from the constraints of a liberalised global trading regime whose rules it had been responsible for crafting, and – most significantly – almost entirely free from migrants.

Keywords: Brexit referendum, UK, European Union, racism and inequality, migration, trade