Brexit Britain (or how to alert the hardest of thinking to the fact that there's an elephant in the room)

When I finally committed to starting my own blog, and more pertinently when I settled on the core topic centring around politics, I made a sportsman’s bet with a friend that I could make it to 10 blog posts without covering Brexit. This is number 4 and yet here we are. I was also challenged to blog about Brexit without bias or turning it into a rant. You decide...

Back in spring of 2014 I employed somebody I hadn’t done my due diligence on. Lovely girl seemingly, and someone I dealt with on a daily basis through a client of mine. I took a spur of the moment decision during a busy period to offer the young lady a position working with me over in Spain. She was based in the South East just outside London, and my knowledge of her professionally seemed ample evidence to back up her suitability. We had only met in person once, and I was relatively convinced that all appeared well. And so it seemed, until just two weeks into the new tenure, I arranged a dinner party for handful of colleagues, clients, and suppliers, and I invited my new acquisition to host alongside me. As the evening progressed and alcohol flowed, the conversation moved as is usually the case away from work matters, and off on a general tangent about anything and everything. While in the kitchen, I overheard what appeared to be a somewhat heated debate which of course set alarm bells ringing. My assumption being that perhaps two of the guests had had a difference of opinion, and it’d be a storm in a tea cup. I was wrong, and some...

What had actually transpired was as follows. My brand spanker of a new employee it turned out had a penchant t for a political party for which I had little to no knowledge, and fuelled by vodka tonic she had decided to make her point about the current state of the U.K. due to uncontrolled immigration, and began to sing the virtues of a man she hailed as the saviour of white British Nationalism. I won’t type his name but his influence upon my employee had led her to go maximum UKIP to the guests who sat agog at the passion with which she threw shade upon creeds, colours, religious bents and so on until one of the clients, a lady from Nottingham who looked to all intents and purposes like your average white Brit decided she had had enough. What my employee hadn’t realised is that the lady from Nottingham was actually West Indian albeit you wouldn’t necessarily think as such on appearance. She’d heard more than her fill of “it’s them immigrants what ruin the country”, and launched a tirade at my employee which was based purely on an incredibly well researched knowledge of such a topic, and bitter experience having descended from a family who arrived in Britain via Windrush many years earlier. Amid my fury at the rhetoric being spouted by my recent addition to my team, I stood and listened to 10 minutes of direct, unadulterated truth telling adorned with real heartbreaking experience, actual data regarding refugees fleeing persecution versus migrants seeking an economic improvement, and with a wealth of historical knowledge about just how dangerous it was allowing such idiotic and baseless views to go unchallenged. Here’s the rub... The final intellectual blow was landed when the client made the very obvious point that my employee was to all intents and purposes a British national working in Spain so was in every sense of the term, an economic migrant albeit it’s so much easier and less controversial to label us as expats.

The following morning the inevitable conversation was had, and that was the end of her tenure, but the reason for this meandering tale is that it was the first I knew about the apparent groundswell of ill feeling toward immigrants that had began to bubble since me departing the U.K. some 4 years earlier. Nationalism and racism had of course never gone away but I was completely in the dark about it having mobilised in the form of a political party that was by all accounts going down quite nicely thank you very much with the British electorate. Living on the continent, and trying to submerge myself in the local community, I paid very little attention to events back in Blighty, and over the next two years the Brexit debate largely passed me by. At the time I had no intention of moving back home, and generally caught the occasional three day old British newspaper that a tourist may have left outside a café or bar.

On the morning that the referendum result was announced, and still in relative ignorance, I messaged an English friend who also worked in Spain but who had worked very successfully in the London Stock Exchange a decade or so earlier to gauge his immediate response. “Be thankful you don’t live there anymore” was the reply. It said it all though I didn’t pay much mind to his retort at the time.

Having been plenty far enough away from the wailing and gnashing of teeth that I now recognise as the Brexit debate, upon moving back to the U.K. I took up the task of learning Brexit backwards, starting from what I observed, and studying the campaigns on both the leave and remain sides with a view to seeing which set of claims married up closest with reality. Now there’s really no point in rehearsing the endless debating points that’ll continue to divide long after the U.K. has gotten over the irrationality of recent decisions, and doubtless will continue to spark fury long after the U.K. has inevitably re-joined the EU.

What is unavoidable however is the chasm of division that Brexit has opened up. There are many unavoidable truths that large swathes of the British press choose to keep far from their column inches. The effect on the economy can be excused as a result of the pandemic only for so long, and the war in Ukraine similarly can only offer a certain level of economic window dressing to the downturn in trade, the upturn in inflation, and the cost of living crisis bearing down on so many people who were already living hand to mouth on their wits. In effect we have a government who swept to power off an all singing all dancing Brexifesto that assured all its doubters, its project fearmongers, and nay sayers that a lottery win for all who joined their merry dance was imminent. This of course couldn’t be true to any great degree, and so it has come to pass that manifesto promise after manifesto promise has turned to ash without coming in any way close to fruition.

Let’s take one example. The ONS, a government office had long since indicated to the powers that be that a Hard Brexit would bring fiscal misery to the people. A conservative estimate within their report cites 4.5% deficit in GDP. To add perspective to that, if you earn say £1000 a month take home, it’d effectively be setting fire to £45 of your best English pound notes upon pulling your hard earned wages out of a cashpoint... every month... forever... and we all know that unless you are of an Etonian education or Boris Johnson that burning 50 pound notes would be instantly classed as a behaviour meriting sectioning. Despite this report now being freely available to all, the chief Brexit protagonists will tell you that it’s all bluster, doom-mongering, remoaniac financial frippery... not true. This is the report that Lord Frost laid out in front of Boris Johnson which led Johnson to reply “but will it be this bad with an actual deal?” It was the actual deal. Johnson thought he was looking at a report detailing the economic capitulation that a no deal Brexit would inevitably result in. He was in fact looking at the oven ready deal that he sang about from every rooftop (and is still crowing about now despite the current storm of fiduciary woe it has landed so many with).

So we find ourselves in a scenario where the evidence of Project Fear coming true is all around us but such is the dividing line that Brexiteers will staunchly refuse to believe such harbingers of doom as their own government’s office for national statistics. Time was that such an institution would be taken as gospel with any such forecasting but the Brexit divide is such a powerful thing that evidence based debating long since upped and left. It’s Manchester United v Liverpool, it’s Rangers v Celtic. It’s tribal, and it was of course plotted to be as such.

Thankfully there aren’t huge numbers of Brexit voters who cite controlling our borders and keeping brown people out as worth a huge financial deficit in their pay packet, and restricted movement across the continent. Instead we have the classic divide and conquer. The Daily Mail and its similarly divisive counterparts, The Times, The Express, and The Telegraph have spared no effort in labelling anybody who challenges the efficacy of a Brexit as anti-British, Socialist, or plain crazy, and the more the razzle dazzle of the window dressing of leaving the EU falls away, the farther they cast their net in labelling truth tellers as the enemy of democracy. Dan Hodges (Martin Keown with one eye and a boil up his arse that makes him incessantly unpleasant in his views on everything) recently inferred that Martin Lewis was woke. Let that sink in. Maybe a time will come soon where everybody is woke except the Tory party, The Mail, and Dan Wootton at the current trajectory...

And to where we find ourselves today. 10000 cars were at gridlock at Dover on Friday and Saturday. The cause at least in some large part is due to Brexit passport requirements that Lord Frost et al hung their hats on. It was going to make us special... exceptional. It was going to give us back control of our borders... it also pinned an additional 5 minutes onto every car trying to pass through customs... but today the RWP will have you believe that it’s all the fault of those garlic chewing surrender monkeys, the French... it isn’t, or at least in the most part the weekends traffic chaos on our shores wasn’t Frenchie related. Were all the passport booths occupied? No... Are French customs officers obliged to utilise every passport booth? No... Would there have been seismic queues had all the passport booths been in use? Yes... although admittedly reducing waiting times down to 3 to 4 hours. Did the U.K. government pay the increased costs to have additional booths staffed? No... and on it goes.

Quite simply, the U.K. is now a third country island, cast away from the largest free trading market on the planet, separated by 52.1 miles of Channel, and no longer carrying the prestige that being a founder member and original signatory of the Single Market brought with it. That 52 miles in Brexit terms may as well be 5552 miles given we find ourselves floundering grabbing at far away trade deals that are effectively putting our own industries into the red while waving them as some sort of justification for the inability to shop cheaply and on our doorsteps. The most fervent of Brexiteers will never accept the insanity of such a policy of self-harm, and that’s fine of course, but the tragedy is that any way you turn in the U.K. right now, the unavoidable elephant in the room (by which I refer to Brexit not Boris Johnson) is spoken of only in hushed voices by the Tory supporting press as it gets more and more blatant that the damage is irreparable and set to worsen as the Protocol is fully implemented... and this right here is why they’ll do their level best to tear it up, spit at the treaty they signed, make Britain an international pariah, and risk the societal catastrophe of a trade war with our former partners across the English Sea, in effect to prolong the inevitable. If the Tories don’t rip up the protocol then it’ll be laid bare come end of October as an absolute calamity of an agreement when the full Protocol mechanism is rolled out, and delays like we’ve seen in Dover this weekend are the norm for those trading cross border between the EU and U.K. They don’t want you to see just how terrible things will get, so they’ll set fire to the oven ready deal, rally the Daily Mail, and they’ll blame everybody else because this is Britain... one World Cup and two World Wars and all that St George’s jingoistic hogwash. If I had to make a prediction, and I’m often wrong but... within two years, the narrative will slowly start to change as Britain tries to unpeel itself from an economic trauma, and a way will be found to start the process of re-joining the Single Market but in such a manner that it’ll be claimed that we are doing them a huge favour... and don’t ever let them bloody Eurocrats forget it!!!