Brexit, A Tragic Legacy
LORD PUTTNAM
As someone safely tucked into in my ‘Third Age’, when I voted on June 23rd in the UK’s now infamous Brexit referendum I felt an enormous sense of responsibility towards my children and grand-children, and the legacy I’d be leaving behind for them. These include a set of multi-faceted challenges the like of which my generation never had to consider for the first half of our lives. Not just climate change and the growing and largely consequential humanitarian refugee crisis, but also an entirely new social fault-line, one that’s defined by the co-existing issues of an aging population and youth unemployment. So, the Leave vote left me deeply ashamed, not just of my country, but of my own ‘failed’ generation. The result itself didn’t entirely surprise me. In the final weeks of the campaign I was aware of a growing sense of anxiety. It was as if all of my country’s most negative elements had combined to create a result which, three months later, I still consider a catastrophe — on a magnitude that may not become fully evident for another decade. The Leave campaign disgracefully exploited a vast well of ignorance that had been allowed to develop over a number of years regarding the purpose and organisation of the EU. We allowed a Monty Python parody of Europe to become commonplace, and did little or nothing to correct it. Little wonder it was aging comedians like John Cleese who campaigned for Britain to leave Europe!
Both their, and the Sun newspaper’s version of Brussels went all but unchallenged. The fault lies not so much with the people who were duped into voting Leave, but with people like myself and others in politics and the media, who for decades failed to pay sufficient attention to correcting the jokes and lies, and the misapprehensions that necessarily resulted from them. As is now clear, the crucial difference that emerged was between those who believed in a bright future for Europe if we could only be allowed to grow and prosper together; and those who sought the security of some form of Merrie England — a past that never, in truth, existed.
Over time I’m convinced it’s the split between the young and old that’s likely to prove the most serious. We have a growing problem of pensions. Young people feel themselves to be supporting an ever-aging population — that’s already a fault line. Then there’s unacceptable levels of youth unemployment, and the disillusionment that necessarily accompanies it. Once you add the new and highly visible generational split created by Brexit, the situation has the potential to become very, very serious.
And then again, nobody could blame the Scots if they decided they had no reason to share England’s moment of lunacy — why should they? Their own vote was very clear, and historically Scotland has always had stronger ties to Europe than England, being particularly close to France. As to my own Party, I don’t think the current leadership of the Labour Party ever had their heart in in the European Project. At the minimum I think they felt conflicted — irrationally conflicted — and it was their unconvincing performance that did much of the damage, particularly in the Labour heartlands. I will go to my grave convinced that, had David Miliband won the Labour leadership contest six years ago, this would not have happened. He was a committed European, and I’m convinced the result would have been very different had he been Labour’s leader.
On the other hand, Northern Ireland’s 56% to 44% victory for Remain was one of the few glimmers of good news. It’s likely that Europe’s politicians will invoke some sort of sensible fudge in order to allow ‘freedom of movement’ within the island of Ireland but also, I would guess, between the island of Ireland and the rest of the UK. I’d very much welcome that. It cannot be in the interest of the Republic or its northern neighbour to create any form of ‘hard border’ — the costs alone would be prohibitive, and in the end ‘who is going to pay for it’?
As Ireland’s Digital Champion, I’ve witnessed at first-hand the importance of the Digital Single Market and the significant opportunities it brings in helping people and communities to develop the skills and competences which are increasingly essential to any nation seeking a successful 21st century future.
An opinion poll carried out by Red C for ‘European Movement Ireland’ in 2015 showed that 84% of those living in the Republic believe membership of the EU has greatly benefitted the country. As someone who spends a portion of every week in both places, I can attest to the fact that what’s good for Ireland is also good for Britain.
To me ‘Brexit’ is just a word — as yet it has no tangible meaning beyond a cry of pain from thirteen million British people who felt sufficiently ill-informed and left behind to opt to go ‘back to the future’. But of course we can’t, life as with all things will inexorably move on. Politically, a great deal is likely to change in Europe over the next couple of years, possibly enough to encourage a re-consideration, within the EU as much as the UK, of the extraordinary damage that will unquestionably result if the broad vision of a united, prosperous and peaceful Europe is clumsily allowed to unravel.
Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, CBE, spent 30 years as an independent producer of award-winning films before retiring from film production in 1998 to focus on his work in public policy as it relates to education, the environment, and the creative and communications industries. He was awarded a CBE in 1982, a knighthood in 1995, and was appointed to the House of Lords in 1997. Among many other positions, David Puttnam was President of UNICEF UK from 2002 to 2009, Chancellor of the Open University from 2006 to 2013, Chair of both the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television and the National Film and Television School, and Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Draft Communications Bill in 2002 as well as the Climate Change Bill in 2007. In 2016 he was appointed as International Ambassador for WWF. He tweets @DPuttnam.
Read more about the A Soul For Europe Pre-Conference debate here.
