When I was visiting England a number of years ago I noticed they had commercials for shops on TV bragging that they only had British meat. Now in the rest of the world British meat was not very popular at this point, and in fact probably barely legal to sell because of the Mad Cow disease.
The point of this story is that nationalism, in this case British nationalism, is a funny thing. I think that is relevant to the Brexit debate since it seems in large part to be driven by a nationalistic feeling that “we should make our own decisions”. As easy it is to sympathize with that, having laws made by British politicians instead of Europeans is not actually the same as making decisions yourself. I want to make the decisions that affect my own life, but to the extent that this not possible (or my fellow-voters won’t let me) I don’t necessarily care whether they are made by Swedish or European politicians. It is great to feel a connection to your countrymen, but it is just a feeling, you do not actually share a mystical bond or necessarily have common views or interests.
To be clear, there are good, valid arguments against UK being a member of the EU, but I think that without the nationalist bias most people would not consider them to outweigh the disadvantages of leaving. So my hope is that the majority of the British voters vote to stay.
The Free Algebraist 