" This is why it did not disappear after the apparently conclusive decision of 1975. It lay quiet for a while but emerged again in an appropriately demented form – the mad cow war. This half-forgotten episode of national hysteria is notable in the first place because the crisis that led to it was entirely self-inflicted by the British state. And it was, furthermore, an example, not of the alleged overregulation of British life by Brussels but of reckless underregulation driven by neoliberal ‘free market’ ideology. Yet it came to be construed as a replay of the Second World War, a lurid example of the interaction between shame, scapegoating and self-pity. "

― Fintan O'Toole , Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain