A Brexpat on Brexit
“’No man is an island?’ What the fuck does that mean?”
It’s a strange thing, watching your country deliberately punch itself in the face from afar.
I have felt for some time, looking back from the West Coast at what is going on in the UK, as if I am a sailor on shore leave, having left the HMS Britannia at anchor in the harbour of the Atlantic, only to discover that my old ship has suffered a mutiny, a new set of colours have been run up the mast, and all of its old values have been thrown overboard.
It now appears that same crew are trying to sink it.
For months, the flow of cultural contempt has been flowing the other way: my British friends have been pouring scorn and indignation on the rise of Donald Trump in the US and what it says about the stupidity of Americans — but it’s hard not to see severing our relationship with the EU out of some nonsensical belief that immigrants are ruining our country as part of the same wave of angry nationalism that is rearing its head in the USA as proposed bans on Muslims and a giant wall on the Mexican border.
The thing that seems most sad about all of this is that before you consider the economic and political effects — loss of access to the single market, lack of free movement amongst member nations, the fact that hordes of British holidaymakers will now have to apply for visas to get sunburnt and pilled off their tits in Ibiza — is what it says about us as a country.
Britain’s place in the world, for better or worse, has always been contingent upon our willingness to engage with it, to accept that we are a small rainy island in the north Atlantic that has a much larger impact — culturally, economically, diplomatically — when we look beyond our shores. We are one of the world’s largest economies, one of its premier soft powers (do not underestimate the clout of Harry Potter, The Premiership, Adele and One Direction, even if you hate all of them) and we have always punched above our weight because we chose to look outwards, not inwards.
For us now to decide that the solution to the world’s problems and the challenges facing Europe is to pull up the drawbridge and retreat across the moat of The Channel feels like a delusional retreat into the worst tendencies of Little Britain even before you consider the disturbing amount of racist sentiment it has triggered.
I am aware that I have spent most of my adult life living in London, and so maybe I never really lived in England and Britain at all, and perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch with the aspirations of the ordinary British and English people that voted Leave. It’s easy to express shock and indignation at the number of people who voted Leave, at how most of the people who did so don’t have degrees or jobs. These people are angry, they are uneducated, they have been manipulated by a jingoistic mass media owned by (the irony) an Australian, they might be old or unemployed, but they are human — they are the ordinary people drinking in pubs in your home town . Turning up our collective nose at the uneducated barbarian hordes is as grotesque an act of Othering as the one that powered the Leave vote, and clinging to London as a liferaft of liberalism will not solve this either.
So now what?
To my many, many dumbfounded, sad and depressed British friends who voted Remain, congratulations — today is the first day of your new career. You are now an unofficial ambassador for a type of Britishness that you know to be real but which was not strong enough to win the day at the Ballot Box. Travel, move to a foreign country, be culturally curious, learn a foreign language, marry a French man or woman (or both), be a credit to your country, go out into the country and talk to ordinary people, carry the flag, try to reverse the perception that the rest of the world will now have that we are a small-minded, backward-looking, stupid and quixotic little country with no interest in engaging with the wider world beyond its shores.
(For an example of how to behave, see the comportment and attitude of most intelligent, educated Americans abroad during the George W Bush years.).
To my friends who weren’t born in Britain, please accept my apologies on behalf of the British public — do not take this as a personal rejection. I married one of you, many other British people want to marry you or have sex with you or be friends with you or just talk to you. Some of the country may have turned their back on you because they don’t understand what you bring, but they will come round. You are loved, you are wonderful, you are valued as people whether you pay your taxes or not, and at least fifty percent of our country need you now more than ever. Please, do not abandon us.
To my American friends of voting age: you are now our hope for the future. Consider this a warning and a warm-up for November. Britain has lost the battle, so that America can win the war. The other side are numerous, they are angry, and most crucially, they vote — but they are also human beings. You have four months, so get out there, stop posting shit on social media talking to people who agree with you, and win the day for tolerance at the Presidential Elections in November.
