When, in the preparations for the referendum, Brexit moved from the ideological to the strategic level, the global elements of its ideas were too loose, thin and politically untested to win widespread popular consent for the project. Withdrawal from the EU had not been a priority for most voters; even during the 2015 general election, only a year beforehand, less than 10 per cent “identified the EU as among the two most important issues facing Britain, and the issue of the EU played a minimal role in the election campaign” (Hobolt, Leeper & Tilley 2020: 3). As we have seen, the referendum had only become possible because it had been linked with racist anti-immigration politics, and the 2016 campaign would underline the centrality of this connection. After the vote, the Brexit-supporting journalist Brendan O’Neill (2017) denied “the narrative [which] says the referendum was a swirl of racial fears”. It was not, he argued:

In this chapter we shall see that there was a great deal more racist propaganda than “one poster”, while the fact that a third of voters volunteered immigration as their main reason for exit – compared to fewer than half who gave Leave's manifest main theme of sovereignty – was actually strong evidence for the salience of the issue.