Who’s afraid of Brexit? Not Britain’s Romanian builders

I spent the period around the Brexit vote slightly differently to most Britons—mostly with Romanian labourers. Were they frightened at the thought of Britain voting to "Leave" the European Union? Were they panicked by it? Plugged into the British press you’d have expected them to be inconsolable, trembling with fear. The reality, that I saw in the farms, doss houses and building sites in which I spent the time, is that they were nothing of the sort.

If you want to know Romanian London go to Burnt Oak or Edgware, both near the end of the Northern Line. In the build-up to Brexit this is where I was traipsing around. In and out of the Romanian shops, patisseries and pubs. This is the word I would use to sum up the attitudes of the labourers that I spoke to: indifference.

Most thought Britain would never leave the European Union. The Queen would stop it. The banks would stop it. Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama would stop it.

Referendums, went the Romanian word on the street, are all for show. Reality, went the gossip, is made by the superpowers and mysterious behind the scenes forces. Not by little countries like Britain and Romania and certainly not by voters. Out of 100 people I approached only 13 thought Brexit would happen. I found confusion, not fear. “If the Indians are allowed to vote then it will definitely be Out,” said Ionut, an unemployed labourer. “The Indians will vote Out to try and stop the Romanian competition.” There was a lot of this.

Romanian labourers don’t get their news from the BBC. They don’t get their news from the Sun either. Most, I found, get it from two-minute bulletins on Romanian music radio. The others from Romanian talk radio. “Project Fear” and “Project Hate” did not broadcast on either of these online frequencies.

The labourers, as they hammered, loaded, plastered and drilled were listening to calm bulletins: if Britain votes Out nothing will change overnight, everyone already here almost certainly will be fine, and if they leave it will just go back to being the way it was before Romania joined the EU in 2007. Labourers will need to get visas and the old programs for temporary agricultural workers will probably come back. Not forgetting the crucial point—there will be years and years of negotiations on Britain leaving the European Union in which Romania will get (like every other EU member state) a veto to protect its interests. On the scaffolds and the sites most came to the opposite conclusion of the Brits they were working for—Brexit is nothing to get hysterical about.

In the days coming up to the crunch there was no firm verdict on whether Brexit would actually be a bad thing. Lounging outside the Patisserie Romana, work clothes flecked with paint, the labourers of Burnt Oak were keen to point out a bright side to Brexit. “It will be so much better,” said Stefan, a demolitions superintendent. “There will be so much more work, less competition. I’m sure we’ll be paid £80-£90 a day instead of £50.” But out of the hundred people I spoke to that day 35 felt Brexit would be good for them, 35 felt it would be bad for them and the rest thought it would make no difference.

Not long after the result I visited a farm in Hertfordshire. Often in the Brexit debate you see maps being shared which show support for getting out of the EU at its strongest in countryside where there are low or non-existent migrant populations. These are info-graphic illusions as they are based on census data. Farmers will tell you that most of the fields in the south and east of England are worked on by Eastern European labourers. Living in porter-cabins, converted barns, or drafted in for the harvest, these Romanians, Poles and Baltic labourers don’t feature in the census data. But they are there in thousands of English villages, most of which had not experienced immigration of any scale since the Norman Conquest until recently.

At the farm where I ended up, the Romanian men working were living in pretty comfortable porter cabins, next to the packing yard, with a kitchen and relaxation space with a pool table in one of the farm buildings. I spent that evening playing and losing at pool with Romanian farm hands. Why did they think Brexit had happened? “It was the Gypsies’ fault,” said Julian, a labourer. “The Gypsies are thieves and they made the English think all Romanians are thieves.” The mood was sanguine. Everybody already here would be fine. It wasn’t their problem that other Romanians would need visas to come to Britain. “There was a scheme for farm workers to come and work operating for years,” they said. But what if the English kicked those I was speaking to out of the country? Nobody working on the farm felt that this was remotely possible. “Well if they did,” said Julian, “I would be very, very sorry for you. Do you think any Englishman would do the work I would do here for such little pay? No. So all your price will go up.” As for him—“There are plenty of farms in Germany.”

There was no panic on the farm. Instead, there was still a lot of optimism. “It’s brilliant. It’s so great for me to be here,” said Remus, a driver. “I am saving enough money to go back and start my pig farm.” What about Brexit? Remus just wasn’t bothered: “I am still making enough to buy my pigs.”

But what about racist attacks? What about Nigel Farage and his “Breaking Point” poster? Here we have to talk about class. Britain’s Eastern European migrants are not all labourers, working in all Romanian or all Polish teams, unlikely to speak, let alone read, English. Britain’s Romanian and Polish professionals are exposed to the full Brexit. On a site in Hammersmith, a mansion renovation, I spoke with a Polish building boss. He was agitated, stressed, not to mention insulted by Brexit. “My boys just don’t get it,” he cursed. “They don’t get any of the politics, any of the economics. They just think there will be less competition and they’ll get higher wages.” But this boss was hardly gob-smacked. Unlike the distraught West London “Remainers” who were often his clients, he felt that you should expect big shocks in life. He viewed Brexit as part of the same crazy European rhythm as the fall of Communism that he had witnessed in Poland in his teens.