How nationalism and "dark money

https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968211033525
Race & Class
Copyright © 2021 Institute of Race Relations, 1
–18
10.1177/03063968211033525 journals.sagepub.com/home/rac
SAGE
Los Angeles,
London,
New Delhi,
Singapore,
Washington DC,
Melbourne
Nations of bankers and Brexiteers?
Nationalism and hidden money
KRISTÍN LOFTSDÓTTIR and MÁR WOLFGANG MIXA
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between nationalistic
mobilisations, hidden funds and undisclosed campaign contributions,
commonly known as dark money. Contextualising Brexit alongside the Icelandic
economic crash of 2008 shows how nationalist mobilisation and racism can
secure economic and political interests for a small minority and thus create
space for what Zygmunt Bauman has called ‘evasion’ or ‘slippage’ as a primary
technique of power in the present. Both the build-up to Brexit and the Icelandic
economic crash were characterised by a strong national-centred rhetoric of
‘us-the-nation’ versus ‘others’ that diverted attention from massive minority
interests, which had access to hidden funds. The Panama Papers showed that
many of the same people celebrated in Iceland as the embodied representation
of the country were simultaneously moving money into tax havens. Exposés
have also revealed the way that dark money secretly funded campaigns using
anti-migrant racism to facilitate the Brexiteers’ longer-term interests.
Keywords: Brexit, dark money, Icelandic economic crash, new geography of
power, Panama Papers, populism, tax havens
1033525RAC0010.1177/03063968211033525Race & ClassLoftsdóttir and Mixa: Nationalism and hidden money
research-article2021
Kristín Loftsdóttir is professor of Anthropology at the University of Iceland, whose work focuses
on racism, mobility, the imaginaries of Europe and Nordic exceptionalism. Már Wolfgang Mixa
is assistant professor in Finance at Reykjavík University, Iceland, and has conducted research
on the Icelandic economic crash, investment behaviour and the effects of individual investment
strategies on society.

2 Race & Class 00(0)
Introduction
Austerity measures in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis have provided
fertile ground for the intensification of populism in the US and many European
countries.1 Donald Trump’s election in the US and Britain’s voting on leaving the
European Union (EU) in 2016 constituted essential manifestations of this populist
trend. Populism has been characterised by a twofold polarisation of ‘us and oth-
ers’, between the ‘people’ and elites and the nation and those not seen as a part of
it.2 In an atmosphere where hate towards racialised migrants has taken centre-
stage in the rhetoric of different populist groups,3 defending against ‘outside’
forces is portrayed as a necessity.4 As scholars have stressed, racism directed
against racialised citizens and migrants in the global North is nothing new. For a
long time, racism has been part of migrants’ everyday experience, as well as non-
white citizens’ in the global North, even though populist rhetoric has brought it
more clearly out in the open.5 The discussion of populism draws attention to the
intensification of ‘neo-nationalism’ or ‘ethno-nationalism’,6 where populist move-
ments join their anti-migration agenda with an emphasis on a golden past and
the celebration of traditional values.7 As scholars have shown, populists evoca-
tion of the ‘national’ is often complex and to some extent contradictory, as they
shift or supplement their arguments with, for example, references to civilisation,
and Christianity as a whole, being at stake.8
Here, we stress how certain elite groups’ economic interests can be secured
through an emphasis on nationalism and racism. This emphasis can be seen as
enhanced by the centrality of coloniality and racism in creating European identi-
ties.9 Hence, despite using nationalistic and xenophobic racist rhetoric, elites can
be seen as, in reality, being more transnational than concerned with nationalism.
Anthropologists Marcus Banks and Andre Gingrich pointed out as early as 2006
how references to national and cultural values were not an end in themselves for
most leaders deploying such arguments, but rather a ‘smokescreen’ to divert
attention from economic gains.10
To show how the amplification of nationalistic rhetoric and racism in the
twenty-first century has been beneficial to transnational elites, we take two dif-
ferent examples that, superficially, might have little if anything in common; the
pre-crash 2008 period in Iceland and Britain’s Brexit campaign in 2016. But the
contextualisation of these two events draws attention to how nationalistic
mobilisation can secure a small elite’s economic and political interests, and
grounds Brexit more firmly as entangled in ‘dark’ money and offshore accounts.
We maintain that it is useful to capture how mobilising national sentiments can
be seen as instruments in creating space for what Zygmunt Bauman has called
‘evasion’ or ‘slippage’ as primary techniques of power in the present.11 This
slippage is facilitated by the efficient use of offshore banking in so-called tax
havens, whose distinct features are secrecy and location in low- or zero-tax
jurisdictions and dark money.12 Our article thus draws attention to the spirit of
Banks and Gingrich’s point as to how particular elites surround themselves
with ‘nation-talk’ – by constant references to the nation and its enemies – while

Loftsdóttir and Mixa: Nations of bankers and Brexiteers? 3
in practice they more accurately belong to a global elite system, undermining
the nation-state through avoiding tax or by secretly shaping democratic pro-
cesses.13 We demonstrate the continued importance of the idea of ‘the nation’
during extensive global transformations,14 while showing that nationalistic dis-
courses can be amplified by particular elites to conceal changes that have in fact
nothing to do with national identities.
Our discussion relies on primary data and secondary material. The primary
data involves our previous analysis of promotional material from Icelandic banks
from the early 1950s to 2008.15 Here, we position this material in a new context to
reflect on Brexit and the amplification of nationalistic rhetoric in the early 2000s.
The analysis of Brexit is based on secondary material. We do not attempt to trace
how Brexit happened in Britain but focus more on pointing out the similarities
with the Icelandic case as directions for further research.
The ‘new geography of power’ and tax havens
‘Tax havens are low-tax jurisdictions that offer businesses and individuals oppor-
tunities for tax avoidance.’16 But they are also sites of secrecy and obscurity where
money can be hidden from the outside world. They facilitate, too, the use of so-
called dark money, a concept increasingly used to capture a systematic tamper-
ing with democratic elections by invisible elites.17
Saskia Sassen’s discussion of a ‘new geography of power’ lends important
insights into the new possibilities emerging in the twenty-first century regarding
tax havens and dark money.18 According to Sassen, the first aspect of this new
geography of power revolves around the kind of territoriality involved.
Globalisation manifests itself in institutions and processes located within national
territories, where some globalised corporations are ‘everywhere’ but pay taxes
nowhere. The second aspect involves new legal apparatuses and regimes that con-
trol economic transactions across borders. The third focuses on the importance of
electronic space as a crucial site for economic activity. Digital technologies have
facilitated tax havens, as have more homogenous legal frameworks. (The opposite
can of course be the case, with tax havens becoming more vulnerable to exposure
through digital technologies as the Panama Papers leak revealed.19)
As we show below, Sassen could not have imagined how important electronic
spaces would become in terms of hidden use of what is called dark money within
the ‘new geography of power’. Taking investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan’s
definition of dark money, as ‘funds from unknown sources that influence our poli-
tics’,20 tax havens can be seen as a convenient way to store money until it is put to
use, and also to complicate the tracking of such money. Referring to Sassen’s obser-
vation that globalised economic activities are disproportionally clustered in geo-
graphical locations,21 tax havens are usually associated with countries where local
politics have been captured by the interest of financial services.22
Small and remote islands are thus usually on the top of the list of tax havens,
but countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK not only

frequently feature there, but, according to Nicholas Shaxson, London along with
Manhattan can be seen as the most important tax havens in the world, using vari-
ous interconnected networks.23 In the case of the UK, offshore territories and
dependencies, linked to the UK’s colonial past, play an important role.24 A 2020
report from the Tax Justice Network shows that the UK is the second biggest tax
loser (after the US), and the second largest contributor to other countries’ tax
losses (after the Cayman Islands, a self-governing British Overseas Territory).
The report also states in relation to the UK that ‘37.4% of global tax losses are
enabled by the UK spider’s web, i.e. the UK, with its Overseas Territories and
Crown Dependencies’.25
While the extent of assets kept in offshore accounts is unknown, it is clear that
the amounts, and the effects on societies due to tax losses, are enormous. French
economist Gabriel Zucman has estimated that 8 per cent of total household wealth
is in tax havens, of which about 80 per cent is undeclared.26 The issue revolves
around both the money lost from nation states’ budgets and what kind of agenda
dark money serves when injected into a particular national context.
Iceland’s nationalism in the new geographies of power
In spring 2016, Iceland was in international media headlines due to the high num-
ber of Icelandic names in the Panama Papers – the unprecedented leak of 11.5
million files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm,
Mossack Fonseca.27 They revealed that leading politicians and business people in
Iceland had hidden massive sums of money in tax havens. A report later commis-
sioned by Iceland’s Ministry of Finance and Economics estimated that the com-
bined assets of Icelanders in offshore companies in 2015 amounted to 580 billion
Icelandic krona, despite the heavy losses of assets in the 2008 financial crisis.28
This amount is around 10 per cent higher than the total amount of taxes collected
by the Icelandic state in 2015.29
Scholars have extensively explored the economic crash of 2008 in Iceland30 –
the third largest in the world, according to Moody’s.31 This is especially shocking
when considering Iceland’s population, which constituted only around 300,000
people prior to the crash. The Panama Papers exposed how a newly emerging
Icelandic elite slowly and steadily moved extensive amounts of money out of the
Icelandic economy into offshore accounts located in tax havens, following the
free international flow of capital and the liberalisation of its banking system in the
latter part of the 1990s.32 This process occurred during an era when the success of
Icelandic business people internationally was widely celebrated by Icelandic
media and politicians as the success story of the Icelandic nation as a whole, rep-
resented as manifesting the shared interests of the island’s population.
In line with Sassen’s discussion of new legal and technological apparatuses,33
Iceland radically transformed during the mid-1990s, with media technologies facili-
tating variously interlinked economic and cultural transformations, and significant
legal and institutional changes took place. Iceland joining the European Economic

Area (EEA) in 1994 was instrumental in this regard. These changes substantially
affected Iceland’s financial landscape, which began rapidly transforming, through
highly politicised means, from a service-oriented institution for local businesses to
being a financial ‘hub’ providing the highest return on savings and investments.34
The EEA participation forced Iceland the following year to abolish capital controls
that had been in effect since 1930, paving the way for the free flow of capital and cre-
ating opportunities for using offshore accounts, as we will discuss in the next section.
The three leading banks, government owned since 1930, were privatised and the
banking system liberalised in increments between 1997 and 2003.35 Part of Iceland’s
entry into the new geographies of power meant carving out the ideological space that
Iceland was supposed to be positioned in within this new economy.
Following the initial privatisation process, widespread rhetoric emphasised that
the nation was becoming a leading power within the global economy, as an inter-
national financial hub. Leaders in the political business community stressed this,
with Iceland’s Prime Minister stating, for example, in 2005, that his dream was to
see Iceland becoming a financial centre that would service international firms.
The ways that the Icelandic banks and financial institutions engaged success-
fully with nationalistic symbols to gain public support for this economic expan-
sion can be partly exemplified with reference to two aspects. First, in the idea of
the so-called Business Viking and, second, in the banks’ promotional material.
The image of the Business Viking – mostly used during the last years before the
crash when referring to bankers and investors – can be identified as crucial in
mobilising the nationalistic discourses that made the global transformations,
which Iceland had become a part of, meaningful. The figure of the Business
Viking fitted ideas of transnational masculinity, with the new banker as a white
male, slim, fashionable, and fit.36 It also engaged with older localised views of the
Icelandic people as shaped by its nature.37 The image of the Business Viking and
of economic activity overseas was seen as an extension of the Viking mentality of
the Icelandic population as a whole, popularised by the media, politicians and in
the reports of diverse institutions.38
This emphasis intersected with a conflation of the ‘nation and the banks’.
During Iceland’s Independence Day in 2008, Iceland’s Prime Minister, Geir
Haarde, talked, for example, about the importance of trust in international finan-
cial markets, stating that ‘The Icelandic nation enjoys trust and it is important that
our companies do so also, especially the financial companies. Banking is based on
mutual trust.’39 The reference to ‘our’ companies reflects how banks and financial
institutions, which had at that point been privatised, were still conceptualised as
being part of the nation, almost its embodiment.
The critical point here is that at the same time as tapping into an older nation-
alistic imaginary, this rhetoric stressed that the Business Viking could be any
Icelander – with the success of Business Vikings equated with the nation’s suc-
cess as a whole.40 The power of this nationalistic discourse – of conquest and of
‘Iceland’ showing the rest of the world how to do business – can be contextual-
ised with reference to Iceland’s former position under Danish rule, achieving full

independence in 1944. Such discourses in Iceland have always been firmly
embedded in a desire to show Iceland’s compatibility with advanced modernity
and stronger western nations.41 It would be simplistic only to see this as part of
the populism gaining more substantial traction throughout European discourses.
Even though the emphasis on Business Vikings was highly nationalistic and had
a racialised subtext, it celebrated emerging elites within Icelandic society, but was
not based on upfront hostile attitudes towards migrants. Also, it did not celebrate
going back to ‘better’ times, as is so often characteristic of populist parties, but
revolved more around Iceland claiming a particular future in which it would
obtain the acknowledgement it had always deserved. The most frequently used
‘us-others’ distinction was in reference to ‘Danes’ as a category, mobilising the
particular postcolonial memory of Iceland under Danish rule.42 At the same time,
the largest migrant groups were the target of much negative discussion; this was
primarily directed at those from Poland and Lithuania, who were often portrayed
as the ‘losers’ of globalisation and destined for low-paying jobs.43 Thus, the issue
is not that there was no racism in Iceland during this period, but that nationalism
concentrated more on the Icelandic people as a group that would now show the
whole world their compatibility with global processes.
The banks’ branding was critical in creating this overall sense of Icelanders as
different from the people of other nations. The banks changed from serving par-
ticular communities or municipalities up until the early 1990s to presenting them-
selves as both Icelandic and international. The banks’ names also changed from,
for example, generally denoting particular vocations or communities to names
that nodded to Iceland’s history in one way or another, or that were international
and generic.44 An example is Islandsbanki (or Bank of Iceland), which changed its
name to Glitnir bank, with great fanfare over that name’s association with Nordic
mythology.45 The banks’ advertisements were transformed, from stressing ‘safety’
and service for everyday customers, to emphasising easy profits in an interna-
tional landscape, yet also invoking Iceland’s nature and history.46 As the Business
Viking metaphor evolved from referring to individual bankers and businessper-
sons to Iceland’s population as a whole, the banks followed suit.
A series of four highly popular commercials that Kaupthing bank ran at the
beginning of 2007, starring British actor John Cleese, demonstrates this vividly.
Three of the advertisements engaged with and enforced the idea of Icelandic peo-
ple as being indistinguishable from Kaupthing. The first one focuses on Cleese’s
difficulties in pronouncing the name Kaupthing, the second on Cleese’s surprise
at how few people live in Iceland and still how many companies there are, while
the third starts with Cleese talking about his new business idea of having differ-
ent services in one credit card, when a bank employee points out that Kaupthing
has already done that. While the link between the bank and the Icelandic people
underlies the first two ads, in the third it is the most explicit, with Cleese stating:
‘So all you Icelanders have got this figured out.’ Kaupthing, in other words,
equals Icelanders, and Icelanders are Kaupthing. What makes these commercials
particularly interesting is that none of them provides any banking information

and, even though they are in English, the target audience is clearly Icelanders.47
Cleese gave the commercials an international and global aura, while also provid-
ing the Icelandic people with the opportunity to celebrate their oneness and
greatness as Icelanders, as embodied in Kaupthing.
This merging of a nation with banks and financial institutions made it extremely
difficult to criticise the banks and economic expansion. This became evident in
2006 when critical reports appeared (from the Danish Danske Bank, investment
bank Merrill Lynch and Fitch Ratings) expressing severe doubts about the sus-
tainability of the banking expansion.48 Many people firmly positioned this criti-
cism as an attack on Iceland as a whole, mobilising an ‘us v. them’ mentality.49
Following a critique by a Danish analyst expressing fears of the Icelandic banking
system over-expanding in its lending, an article appeared in Markaðurinn in
November 2006. It was titled, ‘The Danes are aggressive, and there is no protec-
tion to be expected within that country: we must defend the lie ourselves.’50 The
title focuses on ‘us’ Icelanders as one united group called upon to protect itself
against an outside enemy, i.e., the Danes.
The reaction of the Icelandic government and the Icelandic Chamber of
Commerce was to initiate reports and branding campaigns to ‘correct’ the image
or misconception of Iceland in the outside world.51 Since some owners of the
banks or their biggest clients had also gradually become large owners of the
mainstream media,52 the media downplayed the criticism, focusing more on inac-
curacies found in the report as opposed to commenting on its content, which later
turned out to be mostly correct.
Tax havens and the Panama files
As indicated earlier, more concealed activities also took place in Iceland during
that period. Under its EEA membership, Iceland’s banks could begin expanding
abroad and, importantly, establish branches in other EU member states, since
nations that were parties to the EEA Agreement gained access to the EU area.53
Among the first items on the list in this arena of the free flow of capital was to
establish offshore accounts.54 This meant transforming Iceland’s legislation to
enable operating in a more globalised sphere of economic transactions, which
made international trade less burdensome, while also opening the doors for many
Icelanders to the world of tax havens.
The risk-taking culture created immense profits while markets were favour-
able to risk-takers. What the wider Icelandic population did not realise, however,
was that Iceland was also taking a massive gamble alongside the banks’ risk-
taking.55 That only became apparent following the revelation of the amount of
money the Icelandic government deemed it necessary to set aside to salvage some
parts of the financial system following the 2008 financial crash.
The elite section of the population became extremely rich by taking risks, in
many cases via connections in the banks that lent to holding companies owned by
well-connected individuals (even major shareholders of the banks, many of which

went bankrupt during the crash). The holding companies’ owners’ losses were
trivial in many cases, since holding companies have limited liabilities, often hav-
ing little (if any) collateral, meaning that the banks in many cases eventually had
to swallow the losses. In the interim, i.e., before the bubble burst, the holding
companies’ owners in many instances paid themselves dividends due to ‘mark-
to-market’ gains and transferred them abroad.
According to data from the Central Bank of Iceland, an immense amount of
money went out of the country from late 2004 until 2007. Direct investments via
offshore accounts increased during this period elevenfold, while other assets,
including direct lending, increased tenfold, with a tremendous amount of those
funds going to Icelandic subsidiaries in Luxembourg, a tax haven, where Icelandic
banks were vital players in the flight of funds out of the country.56 A national
elite, hence, voluntarily expelled itself in a monetary sense from the nation.
Simultaneously, as celebrated Icelandic Business Vikings, they ensured that the
money did not stay within Iceland, thus did not pay their share to society or share
the same risk/reward ratio as the nation’s population.
To summarise, during the economic expansion in Iceland, the ‘us v. them’
theme was often evoked when someone criticised the banking system’s rapid
growth, making it seem as if everyone identified as Icelandic had the same inter-
ests. However, while Icelanders were encouraged to defend themselves against
‘outside criticism’, the banks themselves were bustling around, sending money
out of the Icelandic economy to foreign tax havens.
Brexit
The UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016 – usually referred to as Brexit – with
52 per cent voting to leave against 48 per cent voting to remain.57 An essential
part of campaigning for Brexit was the fostering of anti-immigration sentiment
and racism. As such, Brexit can also be seen as falling into line with growing and
intensifying nationalist sentiments in north-western Europe, as noted earlier, in
which racialised minorities, refugees and migrants are identified as key problems
for nations and states.58 (In the US, the election of Donald Trump signified and
intensified a similar obsession.) Anti-migration centrality to the Brexit discussion
was, however, in no way self-evident, as there is a discrepancy in the salience of
some of these issues before and after the Brexit campaign, as is clearly shown in
an Ipsos MORI survey that measured public attitudes to various issues.59
Prior to showing how Brexit signalled a shift in emphasis on migration, it is
necessary to give an insight into the wider and more hidden interest behind
the proliferation of anti-migration views, which dark money lies at the centre
of. Dark money has been defined as ‘untraceable political spending’60 and
while the promotion of political interests with hidden money is obviously not
new,61 it has taken on new dimensions during the last decade, partly due to
new technologies in line with Sassen’s discussion of new geographies of power.
These new technologies have made it possible to ‘shap[e] minds. . . in ways

previously unimaginable’ as phrased by Wylie, Cambridge Analytica’s former
key employee and expert.62
Dark money is often channelled through donations to non-profit organisa-
tions, with the intention of influencing political issues and campaigns of vari-
ous sorts, without disclosing the donors’ identities. As Mayer’s exposé Dark
Money shows, dark money has increasingly influenced US politics during
recent decades,63 but its political influence in Europe is rapidly growing. This
is particularly concerning regarding democratic elections, as dark money
moves along ‘carefully designed and centrally controlled money trails’,64 which
aim, as Hill draws out, to make it difficult, extremely time-consuming and
expensive to trace who is behind the funding. Journalist Peter Geoghegan, who
has been crucial in exposing the use of dark money in the Brexit campaign, lists
three important aspects of how dark money operates: circumvention of elec-
toral rules, involvement of thinktanks and the use of social media to spread
disinformation.65 To circumvent limits of campaign spending in the UK, dark
money was channelled through the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in
Northern Ireland. This was carried out by the use of a loophole in the law,
leading to a ‘tiny party in the context of British politics’ spending a massive
amount of money on the Brexit campaign.66 Additionally, separate legal enti-
ties were created to bypass the spending limits and rules; i.e., rules that
demanded that co-ordinated campaigning needed to be declared as working
together, as this would affect the spending limit allowed.67 The thinktanks
involved are, as Geoghegan and Mayer show, often organisations that on the
surface appear to be scholarly institutes – but are significantly involved in
attempting to mould public opinion.68 This often takes place through cam-
paigns dominating the information space surrounding certain target popula-
tions, facilitated today by social media, which aims to make people alter their
stance towards certain issues, while unaware that they are being targeted.69
The digital disinformation involved in Brexit – facilitated by the use of dark
money – led to what Geoghegan calls a ‘paradigm shift in the nature of politi-
cal communication’.70 In addition, Geoghegan’s research strongly indicates
Russian interference as well, through social media where the pro-Brexit mes-
sage was aimed simply at destabilising the EU.71 Nance describes this as a test-
bed to manage perception, financed by Russian intelligence.72
Several experts have noted that Brexit and Trump’s campaign (leading to his
election as US president in 2016), involved the same technology and the same
people directing and financing these technologies.73 As phrased by Wylie in the
context of Cambridge Analytica (the company most closely associated with this
method, which was mainly conducted through the use of Facebook), the goal was
to ‘purposefully activat[e] the worst in people, from paranoia to racism’.74 This
meant systematically amplifying the targets’ underlying ideas of racial superior-
ity and the encouragement of racial thinking.75 The Brexit context can, further-
more, be seen as linking the ideas that some groups were racially superior, to
nationalism and hostility towards migrants.

We focus now on how Brexit – facilitated by dark money – amplified hatred
and distrust towards immigrants and citizens with a migrant background to
achieve certain political goals. How was it that immigration became such a
salient issue just before the Brexit referendum; what were the methods used
and their effects?
Immigration and the Referendum
While Britain’s relationship with the European Union has long been a conten-
tious issue,76 EU-Europe relations were still not seen as the main concerns at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. The Ipsos MORI survey, analysing Britain’s
public concerns on a monthly basis, reflects this well. It asks the question: ‘What
do you see as the most/other important issues facing Britain today?’ Concerns
about Britain’s EU-Europe relations in August 2010 reached an all-time low, scor-
ing only 1 per cent, and in the following years the concern was dormant, hovering
around single digits. This was in spite of sensitive issues such as the unrest in
Greece during the aftershock of the global financial meltdown in 2009 and 2010,
which was a major focus for the media all over Europe, and seen as potentially
affecting other European countries.
But EU concerns suddenly gained traction at the start of 2016 as shown by the
massive spike (see Figure 1), reaching an all-time high during the months before
the Brexit vote in 2016, at around 30–40 per cent.77 According to an Ipsos MORI
survey published only one week before the referendum in 2016, immigration also
spiked, for example by surpassing the economy as the most important issue.78
This is particularly interesting as anti-immigration rhetoric is often perceived as
being about the importance of the economy. Slightly more than half of the respon-
dents who mentioned immigration as an issue were likely to vote to leave in the
referendum compared to only 14 per cent that were likely to vote to remain.
Although it was not as drastic, the situation was reversed regarding the economy
as an important issue, with 41 per cent Remain voters stating it as an important
issue compared to 18 per cent of Leave voters.
The slogan ‘take back control’ concerning Brexit captures how immigration,
crisis and borders became central issues, intertwined with racism.79 The slogan
was used to depict migrant populations as straining infrastructure and public
services, with stories of undeserving migrants cheating the welfare system.80
Sogelola’s analysis81 of the Daily Mail, Britain’s most widely read paper in 2016,82
stresses that it is not just the positive or negative aspects of a particular issue, such
as immigration, that matter, but rather the emphasis that the media places on one
issue as a matter of contestation.83 Sogelola shows that, during her sample period,
eighty-six articles were written about the economy and eighty-four on immigra-
tion. However, the average number of words in each article during that period
was 19 per cent greater in articles on immigration than in pieces on the economy.
The average length of titles of articles about immigration was 43 per cent longer
than those focusing on the economy. This chimes with our earlier discussion on

how the Brexit campaign sought to dominate the information space of targeted
individuals.84 While the emphasis varied in the Daily Mail’s coverage, its framing
was of even more interest. Sogelola’s analysis of articles focusing on immigration
revealed that the main themes were ‘“us v. them” rhetoric, immigrants having
negative impacts on the economy, border invasion, islamophobia, and exposing
corruption’.85 By constantly reporting such issues, they appeared as matters of
key relevance.
This emphasis in the traditional media was amplified by the massive amount
of money poured into social media, advertisements and other campaign materi-
als, as made possible by the bypassing of electoral law and use of dark money as
earlier shown.86 Different stories on immigration were posted on Facebook where,
as Geoghegan points out, Vote Leave bought an estimated 1.5 billion Facebook
advertisements to target only 7 million people.87 A massive amount of data on
different voters was collected through Facebook, searching for the ‘persuadable
voters’, who were then targeted through triggers that were carefully designed
around information collected earlier about these individuals.88 That these ads
appeared privately on people’s social media page, meant that ‘invisible conversa-
tions’ took place, where more controversial messages could be posted without
the wider media being able to look at them critically; in addition who was paying
for the advertisement was not visible.89 In designing these triggers originally,
Cambridge Analytica systematically, as Wylie shows, used racism to gather sup-
port for Brexit.90
Figure 1. Ipsos MORI Survey 1997–2019: What Do You See as the Most/Other Important Issues
Facing Britain Today? EU/Europe/Brexit.

The Institute of Race Relations in the UK has stressed the well-documented
increase in incidences of racial violence after the referendum. There were, for
example, almost seven times more incidents reported by the media in the month
after the referendum, compared to the same month the previous year.91 It was
later revealed that then Prime Minister Theresa May had decided not to publish
numerous government reports that showed the positive effects immigration had
on the economy in Britain; for example, that immigration had no effects on jobs
or wages.92 Here it is interesting to link Cambridge Analytica’s emphasis on ‘trig-
gers’ with the results of N. T. Gavin’s analysis, in which he stresses that it is mis-
leading to claim that the media simply reinforces pre-existing opinions. Rather,
Gavin claims, the media has the ability to increase misperception of the issues
and distort them. Gavin takes UK immigration as an example, referring to a study
showing that UK citizens on average consider 31 per cent of the UK population
are immigrants, whereas it is only 13 per cent.93 Gavin’s observations can be
linked to images and perceptions of refugees in the UK, who were presented as
an urgent problem in Brexit rhetoric. As stressed by the UN Refugee Agency
(UNHCR), the UK hosts few refugees, with the developing countries carrying by
far the most significant burden and many other European countries hosting far
more. During the first three months of 2019, first-time asylum applications to the
UK were only 7 per cent of total applications to EU member states.94
What this shows is that ‘migrants’ became a much more salient issue in the UK
just before the referendum. The media portrayed them as a threat to the national
body; voting then took place in the context of intensified ethno-nationalistic sen-
timent in Europe and beyond. The UK’s referendum leading to Brexit can be con-
textualised into a broader sense of the EU and Europe’s future as in crisis,95 which,
as our analysis shows, only became relevant with Brexit rhetoric in relation to
immigration issues. This is in line with the issue of immigration as the primary
driver of election results for populist right parties in recent years, while the econ-
omy and unemployment have a negligible effect on voting behaviour.96
Here it is also important to note that the owners of most of the leading private
media in Britain are very few,97 the majority of whom are alleged tax-avoiders
with ties to tax havens.98 In 2019, for example, three companies controlled 83 per
cent of the British newspaper market.99 Peat alleges that the mainstream media
largely ignored news stories regarding the Paradise Papers investigation (a fol-
low-up to the Panama papers), simply because most of the media’s owners were
themselves on that list.100
Conclusion
In his book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman writes about how we are increas-
ingly living in post-panoptical times, where those in charge become less seen
and less accessible.101 In the case of Brexit and the Icelandic economic boom, this
can be understood in a double sense; both in how invisible forces manipulated
public opinion and in how the same individuals behind that manipulation were

able to secure lasting power and delink from the territory in which they lived
and operated. In a sense, they voluntarily expelled themselves from society in a
financial and legal sense while at the same time claiming to be ‘fighting for their
nation’ and, in the case of Brexit, actively undermining democratic processes
through the use of money concealed from the system, i.e., dark money. Looking
at Brexit from this angle allows a clearer acknowledgement of the UK’s instru-
mental role as a tax haven and as linked to dark money, and enables us to ques-
tion whose interest that serves.
While Brexit and the Icelandic economic crash are dissimilar in fundamental
ways, both were characterised by a strong national-centred rhetoric of ‘us-the-
nation’ v. ‘others’ that diverted attention from other issues, i.e., the massive
haemorrhaging of money into tax havens in the case of Iceland, and in the case of
Britain, the manipulation of democratic processes to serve the bidding of a small
elite with hidden money. Both campaigns did so behind a thin veil of racism, in
which nationalistic sentiments were used to engage the population to accept cer-
tain ideologies, promoting the interests of elite groups, while causing detrimental
effects on communities as a whole. In the Brexit campaign, racism was often overt
and explicit, with its most extreme manifestations taking place on people’s pri-
vate social media accounts, thus reducing the likelihood of contestation. The
Icelandic case shows that, as banks and business people were portrayed as
national icons, and the nation as one whole with the same interest in the glo-
balised economy, some of those same individuals celebrated as the embodiment
of the nation were silently moving money out of the Icelandic economy.
We do not have data to show a causal relationship, i.e., that this ongoing
expression of nationalism was systematically engaged for that purpose, but it is
clear that it made it difficult to criticise what was going on. In Brexit’s case, it is
evident that there were different stakeholders with different goals. The racism
and xenophobia of ‘us v. others’ rhetoric were not created from scratch, as racism
is nothing new in British society. But what matters in this paper is that research
exposing Cambridge Analytica and the targeting of certain populations in Brexit
shows how racism and nationalism were systematically used by those affluent
elites that had a stake in Brexit. Racism and nationalism can be used – as demon-
strated by Banks and Gingrich102 – as a ‘smokescreen’ reflecting how particular
elites mobilise ‘nation-talk’ focusing on enemies of the nation, while simultane-
ously actively undermining the nation-state through the use of dark money to
undermine democratic processes. Is it the case that Brexit revolved essentially
around an EU membership that suddenly became less economically beneficial for
a certain elite, with links to tax havens and strong media and political power? and
that this racism and neo-nationalistic rhetoric were mobilised simply in the fur-
ther service of enormous financial gain?
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