My Own Personal Brexit
It’s an interesting and harrowing experience to watch your country tear itself apart from half a world away. Brexit — Britain voting to leave the EU — has shaken the world and caused political and financial chaos around the globe, but it’s also shaken me to my core. For all my awareness of our faults and our chequered history of empire and conquest, for all that pulled me across the Atlantic, I was proud to be British. I can’t say that anymore.
I’m still processing, still trying to decide what it all means both personally and politically. I don’t know how to feel towards the members of my family who voted to leave, along with the rest of the country who voted with them. I don’t know what my country is going to do now or whether the UK will even survive this intact. And I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what my family is going to do in this new reality we created. The only constants are despair and a deep, visceral anger at what my people have done.
Except that it wasn’t my people — or at least most of my generation — who did this. We overwhelmingly voted to remain in the EU. 75% of people under the age of 30 wanted to stay. Younger people in the UK grew up in a country which had, in spite of the issues we could see with it, been noticeably enriched through immigration. We came of age with people from all over Europe and the world in our schools and offices, adding their experiences and perspectives to our own. These were our friends and our neighbours, our partners, our lovers, and our family, we thought. Why would we cut ourselves off from them?
Of course not everyone shared that internationalism. The older generations (who still outnumber Millennials in the UK) have a very different perspective on the whole thing. They’ve experienced cultural and socioeconomic change at a rate with which they aren’t comfortable. They’ve seen politicians repeatedly stoke and pander to anti-immigration sentiment, then lie about controlling immigration from the EU. The influx of people who don’t speak, act, or necessarily believe the way they do — along with our failure outside of London and Manchester to help some of those people fully integrate into their new home, however that’s defined — had them frightened. And for that they blamed the EU.
Then came the campaign. The anti-immigration rhetoric; the bare-faced lies told to make the case against staying in the EU; the appeals to post-imperialist pique and a still-wounded nationalism which resents being dependent on the rest of the world. It all coalesced in a poisonous cloud and seemed to drive my country insane. People were hurt. People died. A Labour Member of Parliament was assassinated in the street by a man shouting “Britain first”. Nigel Farage posed in front of a poster inspired by the Nazis. The far-right came out of the closet again (turns out racism is still a thing). People started to think of their neighbours as an invading force.
And what did we do in the face of this boiling cauldron of anger, resentment, hate, and fear? In the face of a monumental decision about our future? We had silly mock-battles on the Thames and claimed to be “tired of experts” when every one of those experts at home and abroad warned of disaster.
The last week, I’ve been repeatedly congratulated for “getting out just in time” and attempted to explain to my American friends how 51.9% of the UK’s population appears to have gone collectively mad. I’ve had to explain why my country voted to kneecap ourselves economically and politically, and send our currency into freefall. I’ve had to explain why my brother’s Spanish partner of three years no longer wants to live in a country where she now feels unwelcome. And I don’t really know what to tell them except that this wasn’t what we wanted.
No longer are we the more stable, urbane, and sensible cousins across the ocean. We don’t get to be supercilious and smug anymore. We can’t pretend we’re cleverer than everyone else. We’ve just proven ourselves to be nothing more than a small-minded, poisoned little isle off the coast of Europe. And we can never go back.
No wonder Scotland wants out.
I will never forgive my parents and a majority of their generation for doing this to us — for pulling up behind them yet another ladder they climbed. This wasn’t the future we wanted or the one for which we voted. It isn’t the world we want to live in. But it’s the one they created for us. They say it’ll be better. Fuck them.
It’s been said by many since last Thursday, but I feel like the country I left not two weeks ago is gone. In its place lies a fractured land I do not recognise, filled with a poisonous xenophobia and a people who have singularly failed in their duty towards themselves and the world.
I can only hope my new home doesn’t make a similarly fatal mistake in November.
Update: Well shit. It did.
