Fireworks, Flags and Signs: Voices From the Streets of Post-Brexit Britain

Abstract

In this article, Sara Roberts, a former BBC researcher and journalist - currently teacher and writer, offers her personal impressions of the recent rise of populism in Britain, based on her experiences in Oxford, where she lives. This essay offers empirical evidence that Brexit has had a profoundly divisive effect on British society from the micro to the macro level, and threatens the very union of nations that makes up the United Kingdom. The campaign for the UK to leave the EU (‘Brexit’) in the 2016 referendum exploited xenophobic and racist sentiment, thereby creating linguistic and symbolic violence which has managed to pervade popular discourse and consciousness, and which may foreshadow an increase in actual violence. It is suggested here that violence and fear lie at the heart of populism and that all populist movements rely on them, as well as ignorance, to first gain and then maintain support. Acting against the global trend towards populism, the current younger generation; education; civil society and Art are offered as avenues of hope for the future.