There was an observation offered in the final, fictional election campaign on The West Wing: “People think an election is a contest about two different answers to the same question. It’s not. It’s a contest over what the question is.”
The Brexit vote did not fit this paradigm. It was a more direct exercise of democracy, and the results were more radical. Yet one struggles to comprehend how an issue of this magnitude, a bend in history’s progress, can boil down to a yes-or-no question, as if debates about geopolitics were best formulated as cue-cards for contestants on game shows.
Surely, there are a hundred more pressing questions that ought to have been asked before this one. Since they were not asked, and the vote turned against those who favoured Remain, we have not stopped posing them. These are questions such as: how do you imagine that Brexit will restore the sort of rose-tinted world, where a holiday was a trip to Brighton, instead of Marbella?
How do you plan to pay the £60 billion in contributions that you still owe the EU, through fiscal year 2020, while coping with a drop in the value of the pound that will cause a crunch in living standards, and diminish real purchasing power?
See: “Britain’s divorce bill must be settled before Brexit talks, says Angela Merkel,” by Dan Roberts & Philip Oltermann in Berlin and Jennifer Rankin in Strasbourg, 27 April, 2017, The Guardian.
See also: “EU’s chief negotiator challenges Theresa May directly over Brexit talks,” by Daniel Boffey and Jennifer Rankin, 22 March 2017, The Guardian.
According to economists, “The spectre of inflation has returned to stalk the U.K. economy, as the post-referendum slump in the pound has driven up the cost of imported goods from petrol to tea, fish and smartphones.” (“From energy bills to dental work, it’s U.K. national price hike day,” by Miles Brignall, 31 March 2017, The Guardian.)
Brexit did not happen instantaneously following the victory of the Leave campaign in last June’s referendum. The government took nine months to give notice to the EU that it was invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, and our secession will take another two years to implement if we remain on schedule, a prospect open to doubt. An apt comparison might be jumping off a cliff, and waiting three years to land.
Our outlook is not rosy, as the following articles attest: “Brexit economy: living standards are falling as the snap election looms,” by Katie Allen, 25 April 2017, The Guardian; “Brexit economy: U.K. faces squeeze on living standards,” by Katie Allen, 24 March 2017, The Guardian; “UK economic growth drops to 0.3% as slowdown begins – business live,” by Graeme Wearden, 28 April 2017, The Guardian.
How do you plan to repatriate jobs that never left? Every Polish plumber working in London in March of 2019 will still be here after your divorce takes effect, unless you are prepared to embark on a campaign of ethnic cleansing and confiscation of property unprecedented in your history. How would your justice system allow this? These are people who have been paying taxes for years, as legal residents of the U.K.
How does leaving the EU fix the inadequate housing market, the clogged transport network, or the schools where government funding is being cut?
How do you plan to run the NHS without nurses from Ireland, Spain, Greece, Hungary and Slovakia?
…What does the EU have to do with it?
My view is, the EU referendum was not a vote about Europe. It was a vote of no-confidence in England, itself. Bailing on an organisation that the U.K. campaigned for a decade to join (having been rejected in 1963 and 1967, the U.K. was finally admitted in 1973), whose laws and treaties you have helped to shape, is inane. You helped design the EU’s legal code, which you now claim was crafted to exclude and punish you.
This reminds me of what a former professor, Fouad Ajami, dismissed as “A Case of Mistaken Identity,” when describing the Iranian Revolution. He was a cynic, who was proved right. Brexit was a revolution, but its goals were not – and are not – aligned with the results of the referendum.
England does need a revolution, but Brexit has nothing to do with it, except insofar as it is a symptom of an affliction with no cure in sight. Let me suggest a biological parallel: inflammation. This is a condition from which lonely people are said to suffer, which, tragically, makes it that much harder for them to adapt to company and the compromises of personal space that companionship entails.
Lonely people have been acutely over-sensitised to sensory stimulation by being deprived of it. And here, the only cure, is to jump right in: exposure to company in small doses will only magnify the sensitivity that produces all the symptoms of alarm.
England clearly does not feel that it can “be itself,” and be a member of a team. This will come as no surprise to anyone who follows international football, where the England team – despite boasting a roster of capable players – routinely underperforms the competition.
I recall one goal the American team scored against England in a World Cup match, that literally rolled over the line into the goal, by mistake, leisurely. It was a delirious fail. Those of us who watch this saga in disbelief attribute this phenomenon to “prima donna syndrome.”
Whereas the German team, for a point of contrast, actually plays as a team, not as a group of disparate individuals idly assembled on the pitch, as if by coincidence, against their inclination.
Al Smith remarked that “the cure for democracy, is more democracy.” I would submit that the cure for Europe, is more Europe. You have yet to heed the advice of another American, Sheryl Sandberg, and lean in. If you want to exert influence on Europe, you have to be a member of Europe.
It is only by fighting your corner, in this admittedly disputatious venue, that your authentic character emerges, as a relief from a blank surface. A national identity is a work in progress, hammered out methodically, stroke by stroke. You are what you accomplish; not what you describe. That is a hollow and increasingly strident exercise.
Hence, the rhetorical flummox about invoking the word “British” in every conceivable scenario, as if it were a magic spell, like “Abracadabra,” a term that did not cry out to be defined.
Every time I scan a line in some populist rag, I find myself channeling the teachers I had at school, scribbling comments in the margins: “define.” A country is what it is, in practice, not what it is on paper. This is what Jefferson meant when he posited that our existence was “self-evident,” made possible by our grasp of “certain, inalienable rights.”
More to the point, to quote The West Wing again, my generation’s Bible, “Set a standard, you have to meet it.” You have held out a hideous hostage to fortune, in the form of Brexit, and I – like many others who live in this country despite having no roots here – am amazed that this has yet to dawn on the people who voted for it. Since you feel empowered to make such broad rhetorical claims for yourselves, allow me to be one of many who will call you to account to lend them substance.
This exercise will have to begin by addressing the areas where you have already fallen short of your epic vision of yourselves. To wit: the great debate about being “British” strikes me as odd. If you have to insist on something that is, by its nature, obvious, then clearly, something has gone wrong.
I would suggest – as someone who came to England for work, because my company offered me a transfer to our London office – that the persistent addled neurosis about establishing the requisite credentials for “British” identity, has a lot to do with the fact that you have effectively imported an entire foreign workforce. I can only imagine that seeing a group of people not from your country, move in and effectively take over swathes of the economy, must be baffling and apt to cause resentment.
But before lending free rein to such primal emotions, it is worth pausing to posit an obvious question: why do you imagine it is, that British employers have found it necessary to import so many of their employees? The striking thing about this phenomenon, is that it is in evidence across the economic spectrum.
From jobs in manual labour (the Polish plumber) to government services (like Royal Mail, where the kind lady who sold me my home insurance policy was Jamaican) to healthcare, incidentally also a government service, an industry in which immigrants account for a third of practicing doctors, to cite The Economist (April 15, 2017, “A Portrait of Migrantland”), to banking, law, media, and academia, to say nothing of football, England employs more foreigners than any other country in Europe. They are only coming here because you’re offering them work.
But the stunning success of England’s economy is not mirrored in its culture. Let’s start with “pride,” as in, “I’m proud to be British.” No problems there.
I don’t know if it’s ever occurred to me to be proud of being American, unless my country did something specifically good. When we gave refuge to a Chinese dissident, despite our reliance on trade with China, and our Treasury’s exposure to Chinese creditors, I was proud of us. When we elected Obama, I was proud of us. But most days, being American is like being brown-eyed: a statistic, not a value judgment.
Being “proud” to be British, though, has more merit; because being British is being part of a work in progress. A lot of this has to do with being European: you have never been in a position to dictate terms to the region in which your country is but one of many.
Merely holding onto your own distinct identity, under the circumstances, is laudable; but making it a bedrock of social justice and international law, is magnificent. I wouldn’t want to imagine the world today, given its history, without England. The question, then, is, why is this historic and heroic vocation one that you would wish to give up?
None of the EU’s principles or tactics have made any inroad, much less an assault, on all things British. While Germany has welcomed over a million refugees, England has accepted less than 100,000.
There were unaccompanied children in the refugee camp at Calais, with relatives in England, hence, with the legal right to seek asylum here, whose applications were inexplicably and inexcusably “lost” by the Home Office, under Theresa May’s direction. This is not a lady in the moral position to rebuke Europe for not keeping its commitments.
The fact is, the EU has been astonishingly successful at fulfilling its own manifesto pledges. Despite the Greek crisis (note, of Greek, not European making), the financial implosion of 2007-2008, the euro crisis of 2010, Russia’s reincarnation as a comically demented thug, and, finally, the greatest exodus of refugees since the end of World War Two, the EU has held on and coped, with methodical application of its convictions.
The great British debate about Europe, cannot plausibly be attributed to some change on the part of the EU, some new policy initiative, or any actual demand that Europe has made. Europe has not engaged in a shameless gambit of bait-and-switch based purely on bad faith. England has.
And this all stems from the deluded belief, extraordinary in a country whose own culture values “fair play” above all, that when England’s interests clash with those of the other nations in the EU, England must always come first. I don’t need to express how childish this is: we’ve all seen children stalk away from games that didn’t go their way.
But the truly baffling thing about this situation, is that the game is going your way.
You have kept control of your currency and your borders whilst enjoying membership in the single market. The free movement of capital benefits the British banking sector exponentially more than that of any other member country. I say this as a former employee of Deutsche Bank’s American and British divisions.
The free movement of goods means that, with a pound valued more highly than the euro, you can purchase a basket of European goods at excellent rates. Bearing in mind that this country has always imported disproportionate quantities of raw materials, this is a distinct advantage of EU membership.
The free movement of services means that British lawyers and bankers, as well as media investors & entrepreneurs, a huge and dynamic swathe of your economy, enjoy unfettered access to European markets and consumers of their services. The EU gives you an inspired venue for the promotion of the creative talent for which this country has always been renowned.
Finally, the free movement of people means that immigrants have flocked to the U.K. to bolster your local economy. Every time you visit the Royal Mail post office, ride a London bus, consult with an NHS doctor, enrol a chid in nursery school, join a gym, hire a babysitter, buy a coffee, or purchase groceries, you will practically be guaranteed to encounter a foreigner. They are working for you.
Try an exercise: as you go through a day, count the number of times you encounter someone who is not British. Then, imagine your day without the presence of these helpful souls. If you live in London, where over half the population is not British in origin, you will not even be able to imagine it.