Theresa May's visit to India. Picture by Stefan Rousseau PA Wire/PA Images. Press Association Images. All rights reserved. So Trump has affirmed the ‘special relationship’ between the US and Britain. Michael Gove assures us that this is an important step in securing a strong future for Brexit-Britain. Yet, the fact that Theresa May courted the new US president with a 1941 speech from Winston Churchill shows how much Brexiteer politics also draws heavily from a particular view of the past. From this perspective, an alliance between the US and Brexit-Britain seems obvious, even in the face of Trump’s openly nationalist and protectionist rhetoric; it marks a return to the correct order of things as Britain becomes, once-again, part of a unique super-power alliance, not just one of many in a community of European nation-states.
Yet this view of Britain’s past is fantasy, not history. Brexiteers are nostalgic for something that never existed: a time when Britain was both a wartime hero and a powerful global force. The reality, however, is that Britain’s contribution to the allied war effort came at the price of its empire.
