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‘What is their Crime?’ Disability, Race and Eugenics in Britain’s Brexit Debate

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By Emmeline Burdett Disability and the Brexit Debate One of the features of the debate about Brexit (Britain’s departure from the European Union) has been that Remainers (who should probably now be called Rejoiners) portray people who voted in favour of Brexit as being complicit in the resurgence of aggressive nationalism of which Brexit, along with such things as the presidencies of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Donald Trump in the United States, is widely seen as forming a part. Rejoiners rightly show this resurgent nationalism as being dangerous not only in itself, but also because it represents an alarming return to the attitudes which facilitated the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century.  The subject of this blog post will be the way in which many Rejoiners assume that being historically-aware requires one to be extremely sensitive to issues of race, but very little else. One of the results of this is that disablist insults (insults which either imply that one’s opponent’s