Two days after the Brexit vote, a woman in Barnsley, with a tear in her eye, told Channel 4 News that her ‘parents and grandparents fought for England to be free and it was about time we came back to be free.’ The referendum allowed for the inflation of a rhetoric that the people of the United Kingdom have no right to employ. The insufferable Nigel Farage suggested that 23 June should be celebrated as the UK’s ‘independence day’. When was the last time the British were colonised? At which point in the history of colonialism were the British the enslaved rather than the slavers? Unhomely post-referendum England has made me think of home, the place I haven’t lived since I was 18 years old.