Tag Archives: Brexit

June 25, 2016 · 1:14 pm

Brexit – the post mortem

There’s an anarchist flag flapping black-and-red over the empty fountains as we walk down the hill, away from the barricades. Leon passes me in the crowd and turns to talk. He’s hyped up and he smells of booze, which is normal for him, even at this hour. The last time we met was at his wedding six months or so ago.

How’s Sally?

We’ve split up. She’s taken out an injunction.

Some things don’t surprise me any more. Further on and the girl in the camouflage jacket tells us to stop taking photos. The concept of an anarchist telling me what to do makes me smile.

Andrew’s skulking at the edge of the crowd, lean and lost. I like Andrew. He’s a vegan and a chronic addict. He gave me all his photography books not so long ago, because he’d sold his camera. This crowd are looking for a fight though, and violence seems incompatible with veganism, just as bossing people around is incongruous in an anarchist. You have to be better than them, beat them at their own game, he says. Two wrongs don’t make a right, I say. That one’s ingrained in my DNA. ‘Them’ eventually turns out to be a couple of dozen lager drinkers, who converge on the green behind the ridiculous barricade shortly after lunch, squabble amongst themselves about whether they’re EDL or South West Infidels and adjourn to the pub. So much fuss over a damp squib, and not for the first time I’m proud of the city I’ve chosen to live in. Bristol’s probably the only place on earth where a potentially violent political clash could be upstaged by a Naked Bike Ride. Yesterday, I had cause to be proud again. Bucking the trend towards fear and isolationism, my city voted solidly to remain in the EU.

I awoke to a strange new world yesterday, yet it was an oddly familiar feeling. It was more or less the same as waking up on 4th May 1979, to find Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister. It’s a helpless sensation. A knowing that something monstrously wrong has happened and there’s nothing to be done but sit back and watch the inevitable. A friend posted from Very British Problems on Facebook just as I was trying to take it in. “It didn’t go quite as planned” – Translation: I may have caused irreversible damage on a monumental scale. I wonder if that’s how David Cameron felt as he watched the pound plummet and listened to the governor of the Bank of England telling everyone to keep calm. He’s done the only decent thing and handed in his notice, but where does that leave the rest of us?

Some odd alliances have been formed during this war. Middle-class pensioners, media moguls, ex-stockbrokers and small business owners have fought back to back with those in the old labour movement, once their sworn enemies. At first I didn’t get it. Had the nation been possessed by some kind of mass insanity? Had we become like millions of mythical lemmings, all convincing one another that the cliff will set us free?

In fact, the seeds for Brexit were sown way back on that dreadful morning in 1979. Having ruthlessly twisted the words of St Francis of Assisi on the steps of Number Ten, Mrs T went on to crush the trade unions, robbing three generations of hard-working people of job security and rights in the workplace. Her government stripped the country of its manufacturing base, money became god, and human beings became resources to be exploited in its service. Like turkeys voting for Christmas, millions of ordinary workers gobbled up the line cynically peddled by politicians and the media. The trade unions were the bad guys. They were holding back economic progress with their unreasonable demands for fair wages and equitable working conditions. Successive governments toed the line too. Yes, we got a few gaudy trinkets in exchange, and I wouldn’t want to be without my iPad now, but in the long run it does no-one any good to sell their soul and their self respect.

We’re reaping the whirlwind now. Millions of angry and alienated people have voted Brexit, in the mistaken belief that they were voting against their oppressors, and in the midst of it all I have a fearful sense of deja vu. Astute politicians have once again manipulated the impotent fury of the disenfranchised to their own ends. Nigel Farage, an ex-public-schoolboy and former stockbroker, has posed as man-in-the-street-cocking-a-snook-at-The-Establishment, and Boris Johnson has played the buffoon so well he’s in serious danger of becoming Prime Minister. Between them, they convinced millions of fearful, angry people that to vote Brexit was to ‘take back our country’, whatever the hell that means. It certainly impressed Donald Trump, and that can never be a good thing. But the cracks are beginning to show. Before lunch time yesterday a dedicated Brexiteer of my acquaintance was calling Nigel Farage a liar. The morning after, and he was telling the world it was ‘a mistake’ to claim we’d get £350 million a week extra to spend on the NHS by leaving the EU.

The cracks are also beginning to show on the Remain side though, and this worries me more. I believe all human beings to be of equal value, regardless of nationality, gender, religion or any other barrier we choose to throw up. This was the basis for my Remain vote. Yes, I’m disappointed that those principles lost the battle on Thursday, but I’m not looking to pin the blame on anyone – except Nigel Farage, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson of course. When we lump together a whole category of people – be it Muslims, refugees, benefit claimants or anyone else – and blame them for ‘the problem’ we stir up the kind of trouble that leads to MPs being gunned down outside constituency offices, refugees being left to drown in the Mediterranean, or Jews being herded into cattle trucks and sent to concentration camps. Yet before I’d reached the bottom of my after-lunch cuppa yesterday, two good friends had advanced the suggestion that a group I myself can be lumped into – older people – should be blamed for Brexit. I took issue. I sobbed my heart out the day Margaret Thatcher was elected, and again yesterday morning. I’m ashamed to be part of the generation that sold neoliberal economics to the world. I’m truly sorry so many of my contemporaries are too selfish to grasp the repercussions of Brexit for their children and grandchildren. But I didn’t vote for any of it. I’ve spent more than fifty years swimming against this particular tide, and I’m more or less destitute as a result. I won’t be branded with the same iron as those of my peers who stand to profit from this debacle. I refuse to be held responsible for something I’ve fought with every breath in my body. But at the same time, I’m not going to be goaded into falling out with friends who’ve spoken rash words from a place of frustration and disappointment.

Andrew’s anarchic comrades sought to impose their rules by force. They wanted to crush the violence of fascism with a superior violence of their own. In the event, a Naked Bike Ride upstaged the whole show, and humanity won the day without a punch being thrown. We imperil everything the Remain campaign stood for if we start pointing the finger, if we buy into the same fear and hatred that sparked this pseudo-revolution. Human history has shown time and again that fear and hatred are always the problem, never the solution. Martin Luther King once said hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that, and we’ll do well to remember those words if we want to build something beautiful from the wreckage that will inevitably trail in the wake of Brexit.

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June 23, 2016 · 9:14 am

Pandora’s Box

I take a deep breath and plunge my raw hands into the murky water. Somewhere above my head, my brothers are wreaking havoc. I’ll get into trouble for that, I don’t doubt. I’m the oldest, and I’m the girl, so it’s my job to peel the potatoes when I get home from school, and it has to be done properly. I pull the last, elusive spud out from under all the peelings. The water runs icy off my red-raw hands. The knuckle of my right index finger’s cracked and bleeding, yet I can’t even consider putting warm water in the bowl. I asked once why I had to use cold, even in the depth of winter. I might as well have asked if it was OK to bludgeon the vicar to death. You don’t peel potatoes in warm water, my mother said. That was the end of the matter. Now comes the moment I hate most of all. I have to drain all this freezing, muddy water out of the bowl without blocking the sink with peelings. I’m eleven. My hand isn’t big enough to hold back the detritus the way I’ve been taught, so half of it’ll all end up in the plughole. I’ll have to plunge my sore hands back into the water and fish the peelings out, shred by icy shred. My friend’s mother uses an old colander. I watched her one day when I went to tea, and it looked so easy. I told Mum about it when I got home. I thought maybe the idea had never occurred to her. She sighed and shook her head. Apparently, that’s not The Right Way to do it.

I grew up with some odd ideas about right and wrong. Fast forward fifty years. I’m washing dishes in my own kitchen, and I plunge my hand into scalding water to fish out a plate. It’s wrong to add cold to the washing up, even if it’s blistering the skin of your fingers. In a lifetime I haven’t fully outgrown that one, though it serves no useful purpose but to make my life more painful. The England of my childhood was full of set ideas of How Things Should be Done. Our way was The Right Way and everyone else was just wrong. After all, we didn’t subdue an Empire without slicing bread correctly, or serving afternoon tea at the proper time.

The ongoing ruckus over the EU referendum will mercifully end at close of voting today. Recriminations and reverberations will doubtless rumble on for years whichever way the vote goes. Thus far I’ve kept my head more or less below the barricade. I’ve watched instead, with morbid fascination, as the two sides have polarised, growing ever more hysterical. The assassination of Jo Cox last week seemed the hideous, yet inevitable catharsis of so much fear and hatred.

It seems we’ve never been more conflicted about what it means to be British. A couple of years ago, Michael Gove, then the Education Secretary and now a prominent Brexiteer, announced that schools should be teaching ‘British values’. A straw poll conducted by a friend on Facebook at the time produced such diverse suggestions as greed, cricket, imperialism, binge drinking, exploitation, football hooliganism, shooting peasants (not misspelled) and complaining about the weather. The Daily Telegraph at the time published a more conventional list, including the rule of law, personal freedom, private property and the monarchy. I suspect Britain First or the EDL might add drinking lager and harassing people in the street.

As an erstwhile teacher of English as a foreign language, I’ve helped a few students prepare for the government’s Life in the UK Test. The official test handbook, available from HMSO, tells prospective citizens ‘there is no place in British society for extremism or intolerance’. It cites what it calls the fundamental principles of British life – democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and participation in community life. It also teaches would-be citizens a number of useful things about British culture that even us lifelong Brits don’t know. In fact, a 2012 survey for Channel 4 suggested that 7 out of 10 of us would fail the test. It’s heavily based on knowledge of the UK’s long and illustrious history (the book’s words, not mine). The Battle of Trafalgar’s right up there. Not a word about The Beatles.

The city I’ve made my home has a tradition of street art, another aspect of British culture that doesn’t loom large in the Life in the UK test. A few weeks ago, a stunning new piece appeared. It features Donald Trump and Boris Johnson locked in an intimate embrace, and suggests that this might be the future for a UK marooned outside the European Union. Bristol has a soul generous enough to laugh, but not everyone’s so sanguine.

The fear I’m sensing round me now is a familiar one. I started school in north London less than fifteen years after the end of World War II. My best friend’s parents had been refugees from Nazi Germany, and on Jewish religious holidays the classrooms in my primary school were half empty. It would have been natural enough to have bought into the unease that accompanied so much change. Yet the same mother who taught me that potatoes must be peeled in cold water also taught me tolerance. She taught me respect for those who’d fled war and persecution. She encouraged me to buy unfamiliar ice cream from the Jewish corner shop. She taught me to me speak politely to the ladies who phoned their meat orders to the kosher butcher with a number only one digit different from ours. My mother assured me that, had the Nazis won the war, I would never have been born. Instead she would have fought to the death for the freedom to welcome strangers, to refuse prejudice and to treat other members of the human race as equals. She laid the foundation for my core belief that all human beings are of equal value, and to this day I’ve found no good reason to question that principle.

So many people are afraid now. The flames of fear are fanned daily by media, politicians and big business, concerned only to sell themselves, so it’s small wonder so many people whose lives have disappointed them are swept up in the tide. Immigrants are the ones stealing jobs and depressing wages we’re told. It has nothing to do with companies out to maximise profits by buying us at the lowest possible price, without regard for our humanity. Thus the dispossessed find they have someone to blame at last. Here’s someone more vulnerable. Someone who can’t fight back. For too long we’ve ignored the impact of this fear. Now it’s spilling over as hatred, and we find ourselves living in a country where a man with a history of right-wing allegiances and fragile mental health has been pushed over the brink. Thomas Mair has taken the life of Jo Cox, a woman who devoted her life to the principles of caring and equality, because he perceived those very principles as a threat.

The referendum campaign has opened up Pandora’s box, and whichever way the vote goes today, we’d do well not to try to put the lid back on. We’ve seen an unholy alliance of Britain First, UKIP and the EDL campaigning for Brexit alongside Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. Somehow immigration has become the hot issue, based on fears whipped up by those whose interests are best served by setting the rest of us against one another. In reality, the alienated supporters of the extreme right would be best served helping to rebuilding the shattered trade union and labour movement alongside the rest of us, without regard for the nationality, skin tone or beliefs of their fellow workers. That way all of us will end up better off in the long run. But to work together will take courage, dedication and a determination to face down fear and prejudice. Those are values that demand co-operation, rather than the ‘take back our country’ mentality of the Brexiteer. They’re principles that transcend national boundaries and bring people together rather than setting them at each other’s throats. In today’s world, it seems those are risky values to hold dear.

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