In the wake of the Leave campaign’s sweeping victory in the British European Union membership referendum, Queen Victoria heralded the election results as a triumph for the British Empire. The Queen, smiling from ear to ear as she lit a bin of “Remain” votes on fire with an ivory-inlaid gaslamp, said that the Brexit vote would inaugurate a new age of British dominance in the nineteenth century.
“Rule, Britannia!” echoed in the streets of London, where cart horses dragged fragrant luxuries from the colonial possessions to market as Leave campaign leaders Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson made their way to Buckingham Palace via stagecoach.
“June 23rd will be forever etched in the history books as our national Independence Day,” the Queen said. “This referendum embodies Britain’s refusal to take orders from bigger, alien political entities with a different ethnic makeup and political tradition than our own, a principle which we have always held sacred.”
Several British East India company representatives grinned uneasily.
“We are exhilarated at the prospect of carving out a new future for our little island,” said the Queen. “Britain abandoning Europe is truly a forward-facing political decision befitting the era of the cotton spinning mill and vulcanized rubber.”
Farage and Johnson, as per tradition, ritually removed their fox fur riding gloves to applaud their German octogenarian hereditary monarch’s celebration of radical change. They agreed that the Brexit vote dispensed with the kind of racially-tinged longing for the glory days that could cause a nation of 60 million people to risk disintegration and financial disaster.
“The unbounded trade opportunities that come with shutting our borders to Europe will make us richer than ever before,” said Johnson. To his left, a cargo ship reverberated with the shouts of handcuffed prisoners. “About time for a barbie, mate, isn’t it?” asked one hungry convict.
Johnson, eyeing the boat, stressed the potential riches to be gained from Australia.
“Victorian England is grateful to her subjects for their resounding rejection of European elitism and stagnation,” said Farage, reaching out of the window of his gilded carriage to tip a one-armed chimney sweep five pence for throwing a rock at an ethnically ambiguous protester.
The sweep, a product of London’s elite state school system, clasped an “I Voted” sticker and asked a snickering Farage exactly what the EU was again.
“Today Britain enters an illustrious new gilded age in our history, one in which we can use our leverage in international trade to attain new heights of prosperity due to our unparalleled steamboat fleet and the invention of the repeater rifle,” said the businessman turned populist politician.
His own victory speech, to a side room in Parliament in which stood all the firstborn white male nobles legally permitted to vote, consisted mainly in muffled laughter as the accumulated lords discussed plans for organizing an expedition with cavalry and bayonets by the bearskin hat-clad Buckingham Palace Guards into the Remain-friendly immigrant boroughs of Brent and Camden.
The resounding popular mandate, the Queen said, was sure to bolster a sense of unity among the British people in light of a consensus that the European Union was increasingly a decaying anachronism that had become dramatically overconfident in its ability to go it alone due to a self-reinforcing boom in cultural elitism and economic nationalism.
“The monumentalist edifices of the ruling elite in Brussels are the artifacts of a bygone age and a high-born elite that refuses to relinquish its grip on power while waving a veil in front of the eyes of working-class voters,” Cambridge and Eton-educated Boris Johnson said, bending down to let his butler light his victory cigar.
“Upper-crust conservative elites, dependent on selective reinterpretation of the facts to widen the class divides that keep them in power, do not deserve to rule,” he said.
The unfeeling rule of small nations by decrees from unelected leaders in far-off European capitals was an unacceptable, undemocratic relic of the past, the queen of the British Empire stated firmly while flaunting the “classically British” Koh-i-Noor jewel in her crown.
She exclaimed that her 500 million subjects, scattered across a mighty empire on which the sun never set, were eagerly exchanging congratulations via telegram, posted mail and carrier pigeon to mark the auspicious occasion of Britain’s newfound freedom at the dawn of the twentieth century.
“This is a glorious day for the British crown, the empire, and therefore the world!” cheered the Queen. “The future is now. Never again will the United Kingdom blindly enter into ill-advised battles for superiority with a German-controlled continent.”
She then returned to her cabinet to discuss a clandestine alliance with the French Third Republic and Tsar Nicholas II.
