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2016-06-29 08:58:10
Another country, not my own
Jun 28th 2016, 16:23 by Buttonwood
GROWING up a British, and specifically an English person, is bound to have some
effect on one s personality. Just supporting the national sports team induces a
sense of perpetual disappointment, as the recent loss to Iceland has
illustrated. There is a trait of self-deprecation, which Americans sometimes
struggle to understand, and which masks a (probably unjustified) pride in our
national sense of humour.
History also plays its part. Britons have benefited from a global version of
the QWERTY syndrome; our ancestors defeated the French in the battle for
European control of North America. Not only did this establish English as the
global language, but the natural alliance with America helped Britain win two
world wars. The use of English and the country s geographical position has made
Britain a natural base for international business and finance. By being on the
right side of those wars, English people grow up with a fairly benign view of
their role in history and are shocked to find that the Irish (let alone the
Scots) and citizens of the countries we invaded have a much more jaundiced
impression. In a sense, then, modern Britons were born on third base and think
they hit a triple.
It was not always thus. Just 40 years ago, Britain was a mess. As a teenager I
recall doing homework by candlelight in the power cuts of 1972, the three-day
week, endless strikes and a widespread sense that Britain was ungovernable. It
was a shabby, dirty country; when my mum hung out the washing in Peterborough,
the soot from the brick chimneys made it dirty again. There was widespread
racism; Paki-bashing was a favourite sport of teenage boys. In the late
1970s, more people were leaving Britain than immigrating; London s population
fell by a quarter between 1939 and the early 1990s.
Slowly but surely, Britain changed. Was it the EU? Was it Margaret Thatcher s
reforms? Was it North Sea oil (another lucky break)? Whatever the reason,
Britain became more confident, more vibrant, more multicultural. To return to
the trivial subject of sport, in the 1972 Olympics Britain won just four gold
medals, three of which came in the posh disciplines of sailing and horse
riding. In 2012, we won 29, with the magnificent Mo Farah, a Somali immigrant
as a child, taking two to the adoration of a packed London stadium. In
football, a black England player was once a news item; now they make up half
the team on a regular basis.
The British economy was no longer the sick man of Europe , especially in the
run-up to 2008. Yes, there was too much debt and too big a bet on financial
services; but these were not the only areas where Britain was doing well. The
car industry has been revived under foreign ownership; aerospace remains
important, as does pharmaceuticals; and Hollywood calls on Britain s creative
and technical expertise. The sense of national decline had gone; people flocked
to live and work in London as one of the world s great cities.
Not everybody, of course, welcomed these changes. And I understand that it is
easier for a middle-class Briton to feel more secure about it than for someone
on the minimum wage. Workers in the developed world felt that the benefits of
globalisation were passing them by. Still, Britain has had rather more success,
post-2008, in driving down its unemployment rate than France, Spain or Italy.
It also felt like there was a cultural change towards greater tolerance;
British football supporters are nowadays horrified by the racism they hear
expressed towards their players in eastern Europe. The British National Party
imploded in the face of a lack of voter support.
Now in the space of a week, there is a sense that all that has changed. The
referendum campaign seems to have awakened some rough beast within the
British public; never mind a halt to immigration, some people think existing
immigrants are about to be forced out. There are widespread reports of racist
incidents and attacks.
Yes, of course, the 17m people who voted Leave did so for a wide variety of
reasons, from sovereignty through to the hope that more money would be spent on
the NHS. The Leave campaign was always an odd coalition between slightly
eccentric back-bench Tories (who were also climate-change sceptics) and UKIP s
nativist instincts. Part of the reason for the post-referendum chaos is that
there was no coherent plan for what a post-Brexit Britain would look like. But
it is not clear that there is an electoral majority for the "Singapore of
Europe" model that Michael Gove seems to support; Boris Johnson has quickly
retreated from his assertion that the result was not about immigration.
To this lifelong resident, the country looks more like the Britain I remember
from the 1970s and less the kind of country that I can feel proud about. And
that matters because my children may soon lose the right to live and work in
the rest of the EU, an insurance policy against nastiness at home. And if I
feel that way, how many more talented, more mobile people, who came to Britain
because it seemed like an open tolerant place, might decide to leave? To
illustrate the point, here is a tweet from an Italian living in London
Many international professionals already thinking of leaving London and move
elsewhere. Not bc of legal status, bc they no longer feel home
And as they go, the people in this video will feel like they have won.