How did we get here? Brexit and the broken promises of a Nineties childhood

Hannah Meltzer
8 min readApr 7, 2019

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Boris Johnson waves Union Jack flags while suspended on a zip wire during the Olympic Games in London in 2012. Image: The Partnership

This is not the future we signed up for in the Britpop-tinted haze of my Nineties childhood. This week I travel from Paris (where I live) to London (where I’m from) and I don’t know what citizenship status I will be returning with. I want my country back. by Hannah Meltzer

My first trip to France was in 1996. I was five years-old and it was a day trip to Calais. Thinking about it, most of the day must have been spent on ferries, but I didn’t mind. I barely have any memories of this trip, but one element that stands out is how excited I was to go into a French shop and to say “bonjour” and pay in Francs. It was my first time in a foreign country and I was thrilled at the idea that there were places where people lived their whole lives in a different language, where they had different names for things and paid for different stamps with different coins.

My next trip to France was 2001. Another day trip, this time to Paris (my tastes had clearly got much more sophisticated and urbane with the turn of the Millenium). My mum, brother and I waited to get up to the second level of the Eiffel Tower where, once up, we navigated the crowds to get a windswept picture with our pre-digital camera. We stopped somewhere for fried egg and chips and spent the latter half of the day looking for the Moulin Rouge (the film had just come out). This involved walking through the sex district with my mum awkwardly distracting us from the peep shows and kink shops that lined the street : “look! a bus stop!.” We arrived at the slightly underwhelming red windmill in time to take a photo and get back to Gare du Nord. It may not have been a travel-guide-perfect day in Paris, but I was thrilled again — enchanted at the idea that a country could be so close to the island I grew up on but so different at the same time.

More than fifteen years on, I have made this near-but-different country my home. The Eiffel Tower, on which I was so proud to get my windswept picture, was my workplace when I first moved here and spent the summer tour guiding, taking dozens of groups of tourists up and down it several times a day. The sex district we trudged through on a Baz Luhrmann pilgrimage is now a bar district and I go there to meet friends. And I have gone on to work in journalism and write Paris travel itineraries for a living.

From my 2001 trip onwards, my life was punctuated — at varying intervals — with journeys back and forth across the Channel. On a last-minute whim, I decided to study French AS Level at my sixth- form college in South West London. It was 2006 — the tail-end of the Labour days I had grown up through and pre-Lehman Brothers. I received EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) — a grant of 30 pounds per week — just to go to college, a ticket into Central London cost two pounds, my well-funded state college had some of the best teachers in London; the future seemed bright.

I remember staying up to watch the count and crying as this panel-show buffoon was announced as the new political representative of my city. It felt like bad news.

At the end of our AS Level year, we went on a class trip to Paris and our charming French-Italian teacher Rina regaled us with tales of her student days here in the Sixties. “I used to see Jean-Paul Sartre peddling his pamphlets on the street corner ‘ere,” she told us on a side-street in Saint-Germain. “Very ugly man.” I was sold. I’d drank the Paris Kool-Aid and decided I was going to master this language, with its gendered nouns , finicky conjugations and sentences that flowed into each other.

In May 2008 I was 17 years-old, using my friend’s sister’s ID to drink vodka and cokes in Oceana Kingston (RIP) with my friends who’d already turned 18, and getting ready to take my A Levels. As I approached voting age, I remember paying particular attention to the London mayoral elections. I liked Ken Livingstone, who I mostly remembered for his call for solidarity after the terrorist attacks in 2005, and naturally distrusted blond-haired toff and on-record racist Boris Johnson. I remember staying up to watch the count and crying as this panel-show buffoon was announced as the new political representative of my city. It felt like bad news.

I went on to study French in Manchester, where the vodka-cokes turned into Jägerbombs. In September 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. I felt rich as my student grant went into my bank and hopeful as Barack Obama was elected president of America. My friends and I drank to “Credit Crunch Christmas”, not really knowing what it meant, and laughed at the idiot rich kids blasting dubstep out their windows in our student halls and renting yachts on Made in Chelsea.

It all seemed a bit more real during the 2010 elections, when Gordon Brown seemed to upset everyone by secretly having principles (remember “bigoted woman” gate?), then the short-lived hero of the students, Nick Clegg, propped up David — “hug a hoody” — Cameron and Austerity politics began. The ‘totes amaze’ Made in Chelsea people seemed less of a joke.

I started my career in the hopeful haze of the 2012 London Olympics. I was fresh out of university and was optimistic and full of opinions on things I wanted to fight: the injustice of the Bedroom Tax, student fees, Theresa May’s ‘Go Home’ vans. Back then we used to talk about issues like the Bedroom Tax. Remember that?

On the tail-end of the Coalition years, I moved to Paris and started tour-guiding on the Eiffel Tower. The 2015 elections came around and I was sure that with all the swingeing cuts to public services, questionable “footie” supporting and general hammery, Cameron couldn’t win a majority.

As I enjoyed my seamless move across the Channel, French friends would bring up the referendum on the EU that his manifesto had promised, but I hardly took it seriously. It seemed to so much fly in the face of my reality and it was abundantly apparent from this side of the Channel that we already had the jammiest deal anyway — “the EU à la carte, as one of my French friends said. Why would we vote to leave?

In 2016, I moved back to work on the Travel desk at the Daily Telegraph, where Boris Johnson, soon-to-be figurehead of the Leave campaign, was a well-remunerated columnist. As I produced list stories about the best remote treehouses to stay in, the referendum campaign seemed unreal. And then, a week before the vote, Labour MP Jo Cox was killed by a white nationalist shouting “Britain First” as he shot and stabbed her. This felt like the moment that the Britpop-tinted, ‘things can only get better’ promises of our Nineties childhoods were well and truly broken — but it also seemed like it had to be a pivot: a sign to the country that this ideology-driven Brexitery had gone far enough. Surely the public would see these once clownish figures — Johnson, Farage — for the ghoulish, dog-whistle-blowing trolls they really were.

Watching Brexit unfold from here has been a bit like looking on helplessly as a drunk, racist great-uncle represents me to all my international friends.

All British people remember that morning. It would be trite to say that as a young person in London I was shocked by the result, I didn’t see it coming etc etc. I was. I didn’t. But we all know that bit. The next day I went into my Brexit-supporting newsroom where the atmosphere was morgue-like; senior editors stared stunned at wall-mounted TV screens broadcasting a stunned-looking Boris Johnson, claiming victory with a face that looked like he’d just been clipped by one of his red vanity-project Routemasters.

The pound plunged and the reporting of racist incidents surged. My college friends — groups formed in the halcyon days of EMA and student grants (both since abolished in England) — shared headlines on WhatsApp in disbelief: racist attacks, people told to go home, a gloating ale-brandishing Nigel Farage. We wanted our country back.

All the things we used to talk about before — struggling NHS workers, cut council funding, the proliferation of academies in the state school system — were swept off the agenda. No time, no oxygen. Instead it was ‘red, white and blue Brexit’ and ‘citizen of nowhere’. Work Capability Assessments and Universal Credit rollout wreaked stress on the vulnerable, council tax bills rose to plug gaping holes in social care budgets and nobody was watching.

In May 2017, I moved back to France. Watching Brexit unfold from here has been a bit like looking on helplessly as a drunk, racist great-uncle represents me to all my international friends. France is going through its own social lurches, but while I have been setting myself up in the system, benefitting from French health care and luncheon vouchers, I watch as youth clubs are cut and public sector workers are asked to bear the responsibility of shortfalls back at home as the political class obsesses over the exact definition of the ‘backstop’. The Union of the country is called into question and the border on the island of Ireland (the subject of so much discussion when I was growing up in the Nineties) is merrily jettisoned, thrown on to the pyre of Brexit.

This week I am coming back to celebrate the first of my college friend’s 30th birthdays. The Nineties kids are all grown-up. As I write, I genuinely do not know what my legal status will be here in France when I come back next week.

The prime minister has just now decided speaking to the Opposition might be a good idea, while Labour figures cite contradicting policy positions on Andrew Marr. Meanwhile, TIG run the Centrist Dad insurrection and Vince Cable does his best to remind us the Liberal Democrats exist.

The little girl excited to visit a corner shop in Calais wouldn’t have really understood this vision of her country, if you’d try to explain it. The 11-year-old would have been confused. The teenager indignant. Today’s cross-Channel commuter (still talking about me), who turns 30 next year, is just sad — for my country, for all the young people who didn’t want this result, for all the voters (Leave and Remain) who deserve better — and impotently angry, and tired.

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Hannah Meltzer

Hannah Meltzer is a British journalist and writer based in Paris. Writing about society and culture. Bylines: www.hannahmeltzer.com