I'm not talking about individuals. I'm talking about what's happening in British culture right now on a collective level.

If enough people think there's "Reds Under The Beds" you get a witch-hunt, you get a nation going mad. And it doesn't even need to be a majority. The British media has been filled with lies and nonsense and criminal disinformation about the EU for so long that collectively the nation is acting as though it is being somehow oppressed by a totalitarian Europe even though (a) nothing of the kind is going on, and (b) many individual British people are aware of the absurdity.

EDIT: 52% of British people voted for brexit. But even if that's changed, it's not really the point. It only takes 20% of the people in a crowd to panic and you have a stampede on your hands. When I say "Britain is going mad", that's not a comment about any single individual. It's not even a comment about most British people. It's about how collectively the nation is acting. And that takes us back to the "stampede" analogy.