Introduction: The Problem of Memetic History

1The problem this article tackles is methodological as much as historical. How should historians and social scientists treat memes that narrate a political event that is unfolding? One impulse is to treat them as ephemera, jokes that cannot bear any explanatory weight, even though they might indicate a general mood. Another impulse would be to inflate them into decisive causes and instruments of persuasion which could turn the following elections and topple a government. Both are unsatisfactory and, of course, extreme interpretations. The first extreme misses how a large portion of ordinary political talk now proceeds through memetic formats, while the second confuses mediatised talk with formal power.

6Sampling will be done through a curated selection of posts for each relevant event. For each post, data proving its relevance and impact will be included in the screenshot, indicating its number of upvotes (Reddit’s equivalent of “likes”) and the number of commentaries it triggered.

7The payoff of treating memes as vernacular historiography is twofold. It makes visible how the public remember politics, identifying what gets canonised as the important scenes in the long Brexit drama. It also shows how discursive practice, such as caption, remix, and template migration, trains political literacy. The wager is that what happened after the vote is inseparable from how it is told.

8I will begin by reconstructing the post-referendum sequence through a selection of memes that reported, reframed, and remembered the May years, the Johnson turn and the post-Brexit sequence, showing how these memes evolved from contributing to a running chronicle into a counter-history that stabilises a shared storyline about causation, responsibility, and loss. Next, I will analyse what memes do politically, developing claims about performativity, counter-publics, affect, and vernacular political learning, by examining the platform conditions that shape this archive. Finally, I will give special attention to Reddit’s affordances and r/BrexitMemes’s system of flair and tags as a metadiscursive taxonomy to show why it is relevant to my hypothesis.

I. A chronology through memes

9This part offers to retrace the chronology of the main events of Brexit through memes. It treats posts from r/Brexit and r/BrexitMemes as vernacular records that timestamp events, compress complexity, and register mood. The section will be organised in three phases: the end of the May years, the Johnson turn, and the post-exit period. For each meme presented, the analysis identifies the template, explains the joke mechanics, and ties the post to a specific conjuncture, with basic engagement metrics to indicate circulation. The aim is to show how meme publics narrated Brexit in real time, what they highlighted, what they simplified, and how humour shaped the longer afterlife of the story.

The end of the May years

12This post is not a meme per se (as it does not consist of a remix or of a certain established template) but a screenshot of a short Twitter exchange: a BBC Politics update (“Theresa May ponders fourth bid to pass deal”) and a reply, “The year is 3038. Parliament enact the weekly ritual of voting down ‘Theresa May’s Deal’. No one can remember how this ancient tradition started or what it means.” The capture freezes a specific conjuncture: the days after the third “meaningful vote” failed on 29 March 2019, when a fourth attempt was being trailed, and converts it into a miniature chronicle of stalemate. The joke hinges on temporal hyperbole and ritualisation: projecting the scene into the year 3038 (which the author reappropriates in their own title, adding an ellipsis for increased dramatisation). As such, it frames Brexit as an endless repetition. Calling it an “ancient tradition” satirises how procedure has eclipsed substance. The initial engagement is signalled inside the screenshot (BBC Politics with visible reply/retweet/like counts; the reply itself showing 240 retweets and 696 likes), which the Reddit repost compounds by reposting the bit across platforms. The post on Reddit itself gathered 1200 “upvotes” and sparked a series of 30 commentaries.

13Although not a meme in the narrow, templated sense, the Reddit act of remediation makes it function memetically. By rehosting the tweets under a caption that reads like a setup line, the post amplifies the two perceptions we evoked above, which defined the May period: first, that the process had become interminable; second, that it played out as spectacle, with weekly “episodes” and cliff-hanger votes. As vernacular historiography, the item timestamps the post third meaningful vote moment and records a public mood of fatigue and amused spectatorship.

14A final interesting meme regarding this period is the following:

16The meme’s interest lies in its intertextual layering. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a monument of British comedy and a parody of national myth that turns the Arthurian quest into a sequence of nonsensical events. By borrowing from this repertoire, the meme repositions Brexit’s political drama as a farce within Britain’s own cultural canon of nonsense. The medieval setting and mock-heroic tone of the film transform May’s perseverance into a grotesque ritual: the repetition of defeat as proof of resilience, the insistence on victory as the body itself disintegrates. The meme marks the moment when May’s government continued to frame repeated defeats as progress, but it also performs a broader interpretive gesture: it rewrites the Brexit gridlock period as a national joke, a recursive nonsensical situation taking place within a long lineage of British self-parody. The choice of Monty Python’s movie is not accidental: the film itself mocked the solemnity of history, and here, history repeats itself as nonsensical comedy. Through this lens, the meme both timestamps a moment and reframes the entire Brexit sequence as a British tragedy-turned-farce.

The Johnson turn

18In the meme, Jeremy Corbyn and other political leaders such as John Bercow (then speaker of the House) and Nicola Sturgeon, are depicted as Jedi confronting Boris Johnson, whose face is superimposed onto the archvillain of the Star Wars main movies’ overarching plot: Chancellor Palpatine. The dialogue closely follows the film’s pivotal scene: “In the name of the government of the United Kingdom, you are under arrest, Prime Minister.” Johnson replies, “Are you threatening me, Mr Corbyn?” to which Corbyn answers, “The Parliament will decide your fate.” Johnson’s response, “I am the Parliament!”, crystallises the joke and the critique.

19The Star Wars reference is multi-layered. In the film, Palpatine is initially a populist figure, a chancellor who claims to defend the Republic and its citizens against chaos, only to reveal himself as a traitor who orchestrated all the major crises to consolidate power, and who eventually crowns himself Emperor. By casting Johnson in this role, the meme reframes the 2019 prorogation as a coup against democratic norms. The humour rests on inversion: Johnson, who styled himself as a tribune of the people against a recalcitrant Parliament, is here portrayed as the very embodiment of authoritarian ambition and the hidden cause of Brexit (which he defended not by conviction but by political opportunism, as, initially, David Cameron thought he would be on his side during the 2016 referendum). The meme performs more than satire. It registers a collective anxiety about constitutional breakdown and the erosion of parliamentary sovereignty: precisely the values Brexit was supposed to restore. The cinematic template allows complex political tensions to be condensed into a scene that British audiences intuitively recognise: the fall of a republic at the hands of a charismatic leader who insists that he alone represents it. In this way, the meme documents not only the prorogation itself but also the shifting moral economy of Brexit’s storytelling from bureaucratic and political absurdity to an allegory of democratic crisis.

21The joke reverses the expected roles of power: Johnson, who throughout 2019 cast himself as a warrior confronting a domineering EU, appears instead as a helpless apprentice facing annihilation. The light-hearted caption (“Boris VS EU”) amplifies the irony, framing an obviously unequal confrontation as an epic duel. The meme collapses tragic violence into slapstick helplessness, reducing Johnson’s vaunted defiance to childish impotence, or even stupidity, because of the fact that he’ll engage the fight with a flashlight, rather than a weapon.

22The Star Wars intertext again plays a crucial interpretive role. In the original film, the massacre of the “younglings” marks the final moral fall of a character seduced by authoritarian logic. Recasting the EU as the dark figure holding the lightsaber and Johnson as the trembling victim refracts the nationalist narrative of victimhood that animated parts of the Leave camp. The meme thus oscillates between parody and ambivalence: it can be read either as mocking Johnson’s self-portrayal as heroic underdog, or as reflecting the persistent anxiety that Britain, having chosen rupture, now faces overwhelming structural power. This post documents the affective register of the late-2019 crisis, when “getting Brexit done” was the main catchphrase of the Conservative electoral campaign. The reference to Star Wars, a saga built on a falling republic and corrupted heroes, once again anchors the Brexit story within a broader pop-cultural mythology of decline, a myth in which Britain’s self-image as heroic insurgent collapses under the weight of its own misled political decisions.

The post-Exit years

25Unlike the more elaborate pop-cultural mashups of r/BrexitMemes, this post appears on r/Brexit, a forum technically more dedicated to discussion rather than humour. Its presence there underscores how meme idioms have become integral to everyday political discourse, even in spaces originally designed for debate. The humour depends on the incongruity between the anticipation promised by Brexit (prosperity, sovereignty, taking back control…) and the monotonous emptiness of the images. The intertext of Narcos adds a subtle secondary irony. Escobar, once a figure of excess and grandiose ambition, ends the series isolated and powerless. His transformation from omnipotent patriarch to solitary man waiting for something that will never come mirrors the narrative arc of post-Brexit Britain as imagined in this meme: from defiant independence to anti-climax and disillusionment. The party hat signals celebration in the middle of nothingness: Brexiteers are alone now, and there is no one to celebrate with and nothing to celebrate about; the repetition of Escobar’s idle poses becomes a temporal metaphor for stasis.

26The meme captures the late-2021 mood, two years after the December 2019 election and one year after the Trade and Cooperation Agreement came into force. The initial fervour of “getting Brexit done” has subsided into quiet frustration. The meme’s circulation on a non-humour forum demonstrates how the visual grammar of memetic expression - repetition, irony, melancholy - has migrated into ordinary political reflection. What once served as commentary from the margins has become the vernacular of post-Brexit fatigue: history told through waiting, stillness, and the slow fading of a promise that never materialised.

27More recently, as noted earlier, these forums have come to function as spaces of revenge, rewriting the history of Brexit and, now that balance sheets can be drawn, seeking to expose both the hidden agendas of its architects and the broader political consequences of the event.

29The meme’s humour rests on contrast, but its interpretive power lies in how it repurposes Titanic as a metaphor for the Brexit imaginary. In the first image, the reference to Titanic evokes the sense of euphoric destiny that characterised the early Leave narrative: sovereignty restored, borders reclaimed, a new beginning. Yet, embedded in that cinematic reference is also the knowledge of disaster: the ship, in both film and history, is doomed to sink (and is a symbol of the end of the glorious days of the Victorian Era, maybe echoing the current situation). The “promises” panel thus carries its own tragic premonition. The second image, by contrast, brings the grand narrative back to earth or, rather, to the pavement. The visual dissonance between the polished fiction and the mundane snapshot captures the collapse of expectation into absurdist reality.

31The joke relies on a widely circulating online shorthand: “your nan” stands for the archetypal older British voter, who is conservative, nostalgic, and presumed to have supported Leave. Within this framework, Farage’s characterisation as Wormtongue condenses the popular narrative that Brexit’s success was achieved through rhetorical seduction and manipulation with dark, hidden designs, of an older electorate. As in the film, the adviser’s poisonous speech drains vitality from the ruler, who becomes pale, passive, and enthralled. The meme translates this cinematic metaphor into political allegory: Farage as the voice of deceitful populism, and “your nan” as its mesmerised public.

32By invoking The Lord of the Rings, the meme participates in the same mythological register as many Brexit-era memes, transforming political persuasion into an epic struggle between light and darkness. Yet the humour here is explicitly generational. The reference to “your nan” works as affectionate mockery as well as an everyday idiom of online British culture that simultaneously signals distance and intimacy. It portrays older voters not as villains but as tragic figures ensnared by manipulation, much like Théoden under Wormtongue’s spell.

34The meme portrays Farage as a manipulative populist whose rhetoric continues to shape public frustration. His recurring presence on the subreddit reflects both his symbolic role as Brexit’s architect and the renewed visibility of Reform UK in recent polls. The humour, biting yet weary, captures a collective exasperation at political déjà vu: a nation endlessly remaking itself as the clown of its own history, as its title implies “fool me once, fool me…” twice. This general idea is emphasized by the presence of the post tag “Fromage, not farage”, one of the main default tags on the subreddit.

II. Memes, performativity, counter-publics, affects, and vernacular political learning

35In the digital archive of r/BrexitMemes and related threads, memes function not merely as jokes about Brexit but as political acts—embedded in culture, circulation, and platform affordances. Drawing on the theoretical axes of performativity, counter-publics, affect, and vernacular political learning, we can trace what memes do politically, and how the technical features of a subreddit shape that doing.

III. r/BrexitMemes’s flair and tagging regime as a metadiscursive taxonomy

40The flair and tagging regime of r/BrexitMemes constitutes one of the most distinctive formal features of the archive. Far from being a neutral instrument of categorisation, it functions as a metadiscursive taxonomy or, in other words, as a community-generated system that organises not only content but also modes of interpretation. Reddit’s technical affordance of “flair” allows users or moderators to label each post with short textual markers. On r/BrexitMemes, these markers have become an expressive vernacular, a way of signalling tone, stance, and collective identity before the meme itself is even encountered.

41The subreddit’s set of tags, clearly visible on the right side of the user’s screen: “Brexit Dividends”, “REJOIN”, “BREXIT IN A NUTSHELL”, “Unused Brexit Unicorn For Sale”, “How it started vs how it's going”, “FROMAGE NOT FARAGE”, “Meanwhile in Brexit”, “Expectations vs Realities”, “One More Brexit Achievement”, “Brexit got the UK done”, “well well well, if it isn’t the consequence”, operates as a parodic index of the entire Brexit narrative. Each tag condenses a recurring motif or discursive trope of post-referendum Britain: “Brexit Dividends” evokes the broken promise of economic gain; “REJOIN” expresses the counterfactual longing of pro-EU users; “Unused Brexit Unicorn For Sale” mocks the mythic rhetoric of Leave campaign promises; “Meanwhile in Brexit” frames the event as an ongoing absurdist soap opera. The repetition of formulae such as “Expectations vs Realities” or “How it started vs how it’s going” situates Brexit within a global meme grammar of disillusionment, while the deliberately absurd pun “FROMAGE NOT FARAGE” exemplifies how national become affective shorthand for cultural fatigue explaining that the user posting this is advocating for joining back the Union with France (“Fromage”) and refuses Brexit (“Farage”).

43This taxonomy also functions as a form of collective memory work. Over time, repeated tags constitute an index of the Brexit story as told by the users, who then act as its online chroniclers. The very recurrence of “Brexit in a nutshell” or “One More Brexit Achievement” marks the consolidation of a narrative pattern: anticipation, absurdity, consequence, regret. These paratexts, to borrow Gérard Genette’s term, are not secondary to the memes: they are constitutive of them. They frame the encounter, offering interpretive cues that turn individual jokes into elements of a broader historiographical discourse.

44Ultimately, r/BrexitMemes’s flairing regime embodies the hybrid condition of contemporary political vernaculars: both playful and archival, participatory yet highly codified. It provides users with a collectively authored grammar of irony, through which the community not only narrates but continuously re-classifies Brexit’s meaning. The flair system is thus both infrastructure and commentary. It is an evolving meta-language that records how irony itself became the online language, vulgar and vernacular, of Britain’s post-Brexit imagination.

Conclusion

45This article has treated Brexit memes not as disposable ephemera or decisive causal levers, but as vernacular historiography: condensed narratives through which publics remember, argue over, and re-stage recent political history. Reading across the May years, the Johnson turn, and the post-Brexit afterlife, we saw humour shift from tragicomic paralysis to authoritarian allegory and, finally, to weary self-parody, an affective arc that tracks how meaning hardened into a shared storyline about causation, responsibility, and loss. In this archive, memes do political work performatively (delegitimising and reassigning roles), as counter-public practice (consolidating oppositional readings), affectively (organising sentiment and memory), and pedagogically (cultivating vernacular political learning through repetition, remix, and reply of events and pop culture elements). Crucially, Reddit’s affordances, for example r/BrexitMemes’s flair and tagging regime, operate as a metadiscursive taxonomy which pre-frames interpretation and stabilises the archive’s voice; platform governance is thus inseparable from the histories that can be told.