Tower and Town, October 2016

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The Referendum - Brexit Three Months Later

The writer and Restaurant critic A.A. Gill reflected my view as well as anyone:

The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the Impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation. There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us.

I fully identify with this, so for me there was no doubt whatsoever which way my vote would go. I would love to see my country fully involved in the committed struggle to improve the workings of the European Union. I hated the lies put about by the Brexiteers of Farage and the Tory hard right, but I also deplored the mercenary and selfish counter messages of fear posted by the Remainers. No one has ever been inspired by a negative campaign and it was clear to me as I canvassed on the streets of Marlborough and Devizes, trying to further the Remain cause, that we were fighting a losing battle.

And then on June 24th, at about 3 in the morning as I saw the results coming in from Newcastle and Sunderland, I could see the awful writing on the wall. In the most important vote of my 70 year old lifetime, we had chosen Isolationism, and turned our back on international cooperation – what a disappointment!

Three months later, not much has changed. Mrs May has repeated ad nauseam that “Brexit is Brexit” but that is about as relevant as “Breakfast is Breakfast”. People are reaching conclusions about the success or failure of the vote, when the only real conclusions will be seen several years down the line.

Some of my main conclusions were expressed brilliantly by Jeremy Kinsman, former Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. He pointed out that:

Referenda are the nuclear weapons of democracy. In parliamentary systems they are redundant. Seeking a simplistic binary yes/no answer to complex questions, they succumb to emotion and run amok. Their destructive aftermath lasts for generations.

In any referendum over separation, the “independence” side appeals to the patriotic heart. The thinking of the Leave side is magical. It plucks at a dimly remembered but glorified past (that was never as good as nostalgia makes it), and offers a future that is imaginary.

The referendum shouldn’t have been a response to party politics. Its significance is existential. It can’t be undone. But people can’t be expected just to absorb the pain and stay calm and carry on. There is real disbelief that those about to take charge know what they are doing. Public antipathy and division will increase. The elected Parliament is against Brexit. Your friends abroad are aghast.

The worst part of the Brexit Issue is, for me, the personal disruption and anxiety that the decision has provoked for several of my family and friends. My niece, Sophie, who lives in Edinburgh, is a fierce and fervent Remainer, like her Uncle. She has started to investigate the possibility of using her Irish maternal roots to reacquire (if needed) her European citizenship. She posted the following, as befits a member of the younger generation, just after the Referendum:

I sometimes fear that people might think that fascism arrives in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up the neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the venal and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you!

Veronique Martin, a French writer living in Bath writes as follows:

...I have momentarily disconnected from Facebook to have a vital break after all the Brexit turmoil (losing friends, my rose-tinted vision of Britain and my projects for the future in France).

Andrew Unwin