Read more: What to do about the referendum result?
My dad, post-war Atlanticist and Empire nostalgic as he was, to my constant irritation would talk about Europe as if it were a continent beyond the Channel to which he didn’t belong. “We’re part of Europe,” I’d tell him and he’d mumble, “Yes, yes.” But I knew he was unconvinced. It wasn’t until 24th June that I understood how deeply entrenched this view still is in the UK. I discovered that my father’s ethos, its nostalgia for the past, its discomfort with the present and its dread of the future, had won the day.
Even when, out of his five daughters, three were living in France and one in Spain, my dad never accepted the idea that the UK might actually belong in Europe. He grew to admire the miracle of his seven bilingual grandchildren, their mobility and their adaptability as they moved through European cities, studying and working in French, English or Spanish, but he never embraced his country’s place in the EU, which irritated him to the last.
I should have realised that the mean-spirited campaigns unfolding in the run-up to the referendum were a sign that the conversation had been hijacked by those, on both sides of the argument, who clung to the belief that Britain was superior to the rest of Europe. With hindsight, of course, we all now realise that both “Leave” and “Remain” were too busy lying to each other—about immigration, the NHS, the cost to the economy of staying or going—to think of arguing for the value to future generations of belonging to, by which I mean being proud citizens of, an extraordinarily rich continent, as opposed to just a marketplace of 500m customers.
My own children and their cousins understand the value of their pan-European heritage, so they’re bereft. “I’m so sad, Mum!” my daughter Ella texted on the day of the result. “I feel part of me has been rejected by this vote, so a part of me wants to cut myself off from my Englishness.” Her 24-year-old cousin, Bee (also raised in France by an English mother and French father) was “aghast.” She’d always seen xenophobia as a French malady from which the UK with its openness to globalisation had long recovered. (It’s now clear, from the upsurge in racist attacks across the country, that the referendum has also unleashed Britain’s darkest forces.) This niece was in Brussels during the bombings and like my daughter—who lost people she knew in the Paris attacks—was deeply affected, so it’s hardly surprising that she “suddenly feels no sense of kinship with a country that can abandon Europe.”
Stanley, my English, London-raised nephew, who grew up wanting the cultural fluidity that his cousins had, ended up reading French, Spanish and Arabic at Southampton University. He has just graduated speaking all three languages fluently and was considering his options. “I feel dismay, depression, anger, disappointment,” he told me. “This has made me want to leave England even more.”
Jamie, a 30-year-old English friend, who’d just found a job working in an art foundation in Arles, wrote of feeling “ashamed.” “I love the European Union and have been extremely proud to be a part of it.” He recalled Bertrand Russell’s maxim that the world is full of intelligent people who are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
It’s one thing to deplore the selfishness of the affluent elderly, many of whom voted to leave the EU out of fear of modernity or nostalgia, or to regret the arrogance and moral vacuity of those sophistical, Spectator-reading right-libertarians who voted “Leave” to be contrarian, but it’s impossible not to sympathise with the poor and disenfranchised who voted out of rage or despair and who, like their counterparts in France (many of whom vote for Marine Le Pen) don’t feel represented by their mainstream politicians.
The English thrive on adversity and I’ve no doubt we’ll come through somehow, but it’s a tragedy to me in a world where so much of humanity’s cultural heritage is being wiped out by Islamic State, that neither David Cameron, nor Jeremy Corbyn ever saw fit to give voice to the potential cultural, emotional and psychological costs to the next generation of Britons, and to the world as a whole, of the UK turning its back on its European neighbours, or indeed to point out what the educated young already know: that in this digital age, national borders are a retrogressive fantasy.
My dad, post-war Atlanticist and Empire nostalgic as he was, to my constant irritation would talk about Europe as if it were a continent beyond the Channel to which he didn’t belong. “We’re part of Europe,” I’d tell him and he’d mumble, “Yes, yes.” But I knew he was unconvinced. It wasn’t until 24th June that I understood how deeply entrenched this view still is in the UK. I discovered that my father’s ethos, its nostalgia for the past, its discomfort with the present and its dread of the future, had won the day.
Even when, out of his five daughters, three were living in France and one in Spain, my dad never accepted the idea that the UK might actually belong in Europe. He grew to admire the miracle of his seven bilingual grandchildren, their mobility and their adaptability as they moved through European cities, studying and working in French, English or Spanish, but he never embraced his country’s place in the EU, which irritated him to the last.
I should have realised that the mean-spirited campaigns unfolding in the run-up to the referendum were a sign that the conversation had been hijacked by those, on both sides of the argument, who clung to the belief that Britain was superior to the rest of Europe. With hindsight, of course, we all now realise that both “Leave” and “Remain” were too busy lying to each other—about immigration, the NHS, the cost to the economy of staying or going—to think of arguing for the value to future generations of belonging to, by which I mean being proud citizens of, an extraordinarily rich continent, as opposed to just a marketplace of 500m customers.
My own children and their cousins understand the value of their pan-European heritage, so they’re bereft. “I’m so sad, Mum!” my daughter Ella texted on the day of the result. “I feel part of me has been rejected by this vote, so a part of me wants to cut myself off from my Englishness.” Her 24-year-old cousin, Bee (also raised in France by an English mother and French father) was “aghast.” She’d always seen xenophobia as a French malady from which the UK with its openness to globalisation had long recovered. (It’s now clear, from the upsurge in racist attacks across the country, that the referendum has also unleashed Britain’s darkest forces.) This niece was in Brussels during the bombings and like my daughter—who lost people she knew in the Paris attacks—was deeply affected, so it’s hardly surprising that she “suddenly feels no sense of kinship with a country that can abandon Europe.”
Stanley, my English, London-raised nephew, who grew up wanting the cultural fluidity that his cousins had, ended up reading French, Spanish and Arabic at Southampton University. He has just graduated speaking all three languages fluently and was considering his options. “I feel dismay, depression, anger, disappointment,” he told me. “This has made me want to leave England even more.”
Jamie, a 30-year-old English friend, who’d just found a job working in an art foundation in Arles, wrote of feeling “ashamed.” “I love the European Union and have been extremely proud to be a part of it.” He recalled Bertrand Russell’s maxim that the world is full of intelligent people who are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
It’s one thing to deplore the selfishness of the affluent elderly, many of whom voted to leave the EU out of fear of modernity or nostalgia, or to regret the arrogance and moral vacuity of those sophistical, Spectator-reading right-libertarians who voted “Leave” to be contrarian, but it’s impossible not to sympathise with the poor and disenfranchised who voted out of rage or despair and who, like their counterparts in France (many of whom vote for Marine Le Pen) don’t feel represented by their mainstream politicians.
The English thrive on adversity and I’ve no doubt we’ll come through somehow, but it’s a tragedy to me in a world where so much of humanity’s cultural heritage is being wiped out by Islamic State, that neither David Cameron, nor Jeremy Corbyn ever saw fit to give voice to the potential cultural, emotional and psychological costs to the next generation of Britons, and to the world as a whole, of the UK turning its back on its European neighbours, or indeed to point out what the educated young already know: that in this digital age, national borders are a retrogressive fantasy.
