A Very Bad Day
Today is a bad day, and there are more coming
Brexit, as it transpires, does not only mean Brexit. It means a return to the good, British traditions we somehow squandered and left behind in our rush to legislate about bananas. We will be getting back the really important things: the right to commit acts of violence, apparently, being among the most important. The unruly youth is in need of a clip across the ear, and murderers, terrorists and paedos should expect the noose. (I say the noose because that was our preferred method back in the olden days, but of course there are other options. We could go full American and have the electric chair. We obviously wouldn’t want the guillotine — nasty French thing — but the firing squad, despite its distressing dictatorial ambiance, could be just the thing to season our younger soldiers. A few weeks at the end of basic training killing serious offenders tied to upright posts and there’d be no trouble in combat down the line.)
Blue passports and old, energy-inefficient bulbs. Pre-decimal currency and Imperial measurements.
I am ashamed today. Really, bone marrow-deep, gut-twisting shame.
Today is the day Britain elects to fall back down the well of its own ugly history. Welcome to a state not merely run by the Nasty Party but which has vigorously and assertively chosen to become the Nasty Country. This is the land of Send Em Back, I’m All Right Jack. It’s Gunboat Britain, sailing the Royal Yacht (with military escort) into ports around the world to strong arm, bribe and cajole advantageous concessions. The Empire will come again.
And we will be invited to imagine that that country is some kind of fatuous realisation of JRR Tolkien’s hobbity shire, as if the whole point of that rather ill-fitting aspect of The Lord of the Rings was not that the time of the bucolic pastoral life of the Shire was ending and the Age of Men (for which read industrialisation and workhouses) had come. As if the Romantic poets did not make up the rural idyll they depicted, against the backdrop of an increasingly urbanised nation. As if physical and social mobility, education, better jobs with better rights for employees, higher standards of living, anaesthetic, healthcare and vaccinations, tolerance and emancipation were not all things that came out of the modern age.
In the name of Nigel Farage’s pompous, jingoistic mood music, Britain is playing dress-up instead of confronting its problems. Brexit, if it goes ahead in the direction which presently seems likely — a hard Brexit, possibly a crash-out — will lock the political gate on a bewildered Labour Party. The same austere economic delusions which have brought us to our present situation of a collapsing National Health Service and a dozen other obvious catastrophes will require fewer workers’ rights, fewer environmental protections, lower taxes for corporations and high earners. Trade deals with the US will entail the opening of our healthcare market to their firms. This Brexit is a fire sale of Britain’s socialised infrastructure, and at the far end there’ll be a lean — skeletal — state, shorter life expectancy, more expensive imports, longer working hours and later retirement. Immigration, of course, has been the hinge-point: Britain desperately needs immigrant workers in many sectors, and yet blames immigrants for the stretching of services starved by austerity policies — especially in places where there are few if any immigrants.
And this. This is what that actually means. Britain generally, it seems, would rather have immigrants who speak English as a first language, and/or who are more likely to be white than not, definitely not Muslims or anyone recently highlighted by the tabloid press as liable to arrive in floods, deluges, hordes, waves, or plagues. This is a map of our disgrace.
Brexit is a nonsense cure for a sickness that does not exist, proposed as a remedy for serious maladies that do. It is as toxic as using mercury to ward off demonic possession, and as pointless. It is about going back to a past that never existed and leaving behind a future that we could have made better than the present. It is the refusal to accept that governance is hard and there are no simple solutions to complex problems. It is wish-fulfilment culture at its most corrosive.
There’s no point, is there, talking about the loss to our science culture, to our educational institutions, to our standing in the world? There’s no point talking about the common sense things. No point discussing practicalities or the impossibility of that endlessly stupid “we can have our cake and eat it too” mantra that the Brexit crew have been chanting. That expression is a lesson to children about what is not possible, and yet somehow it has become government policy. No doubt we’ll also get a free lunch, and force the European Commission to divulge the secret of putting spilt milk back in the bottle so we don’t have to cry over it.
Except that I will.
Europe is my home. I grew up in it. I learned its languages, its culture, its cooking. I love it.
I will not ever let it go.
I will not ever forgive you for trying to take it from me.
