Brexit and Self-Confidence

World Sees Brexit UK’s Union Jack as What it Means to be Great Again - An American Writes, Daily Express, January 21, 2021. "In the Victorian Age, Britain’s confidence was based on its belief that it had a gift for government. The French cooked better food; the Italians wrote finer music; the Americans invented the telegraph. But as the rise of the House of Commons proved, and as Joseph Chamberlain put it, the British were “a great governing race.” That confidence endured, fortified by victory in two wars, into the late 1950s. But after 1945, popular expectations of Western governments changed. Governments were now justified in the people’s eyes by the benefits they provided and the economic growth they oversaw."