The curtain of the referendum drama rises on a plucky little beer-drinking island folk, deferential to their Eton-educated betters but beset by the fire-breathing dragon of Brussels, which forces them to straighten their bananas and chuck away perfectly serviceable Hoovers. Enter stage right Boris Johnson and Michael Gove wearing the armour of St George. What a cheek, forcing clean beaches and breathable air on us. We must take back control!
Their props – Nigel Farage’s traditional pint, Johnson’s ruffled hair, but not for some reason Jeremy Corbyn’s rumpled suit – identify them as lovable anti-establishment rebels. They promise us “sovereignty”. No one knows what that means in this globalised world. But it sounds like the Queen, so that’s nice.
Cautious economic “experts” are led on in shackles. The audience is invited to lob bricks at them. This is a great nation. We will succeed alone – like Norway, like Switzerland, like Australia. They also have immigrants? Nobody told us that. Like Albania? Yes, Albania is very nice too, and soon it will be the model for our economy.
The drama enters a new act, as the islanders face another threat – “swarms” of migrants.
There are too many foreigners in my GP surgery, the islanders cry. Even my GP is a foreigner! Of course, it’s mainly smokers, obese people, the poor and especially us oldies who overburden the NHS, while many of the “foreigners” are our carers. Exit stage left a “swarm” of foreign people in blue uniforms. The islanders look around in shock. Who will look after us now?
“There are too many foreigners undercutting wages,” they moan. But leaving the EU won’t stop employers looking for cheaper labour. What we need is trade unions. Enter stage right the prime minister, with a cunning wheeze to strip them of their cash flow. The knights of St George nod and wink.
The leavers say money must cross borders freely, seeking out investment opportunities, leaving the grotty superfluous people behind. The EU should be about trade, they say, not sticking its nose into “our” society. That’s freedom. Not creepy state-sponsored freedom that protects the likes of pregnant women, agency workers or jobless people, but muscular freedom, the sort that RHTawney meant when he said: “Freedom for the pike is death to the minnow”.
If we stayed in the EU, we were warned, millions of Turks would arrive. Women would be molested. The NHS would collapse. Here in Sheffield, some nice Indian families, themselves refugees from Uganda, voted leave because they couldn’t stand the Slovaks. My Polish plumber, settled here, wanted Britain to leave Europe because of too many Pakistanis. (Yes, I know, but he doesn’t.) Soon the stage is seething with people who hate one another.
The Brexit press enters the fray: in its feeding frenzy, it doesn’t distinguish between refugees and migrants , between the poor people huddled in Calais trying to hitch a ride to Britain and job-stealing Polish plumbers.
I don’t remember much about being a refugee myself, I was not quite two, but I remember my Ukrainian parents talking about the kindness with which we were made welcome when we arrived here from a refugee camp in Drachensee, Germany, after the second world war, as part of the largest displacement of humans in the world’s history, only recently eclipsed by the present misery of Syria.
By the time they were in their mid-30s, my parents had lived through the first world war, the Russian revolution, the ensuing famine and civil war, the Stalin purges in which my grandfather died, the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor), the second world war, deportation into Germany, the forced labour camps and the blitz of German cities. When they arrived in Britain in 1948, they must have thought – phew!
My parents loved Britain – though they never stopped loving Ukraine. What they loved was that the Yorkshire people were so nice, the authorities left you alone, and there was always enough food. Britain, they said, is a country where people could live their lives without interference, where everyone could work hard, get rich, and pay taxes (they didn’t know that if you got very rich, the government wouldn’t even bother to collect them).
Meanwhile, on the far right, an auction seems to be taking place. A little cabal of Brexiters are hurrying to flog off treasures such as the NHS, the Land Registry, the BBC, universities. After the economic panic, they are short of cash.
The sound of haggling is drowned out by a chorus of mournful violins and the nostalgic sighs of older islanders. The audience reach for their tissues. Don’t we all long to turn the clock back to the days of our youth, to a Britain that was kinder, more equal, less complicated, bathed in the after-glow of postwar consensus (though also noticeably poorer, less tolerant and duller)?
It’s easy to blame foreigners for the changes that have made us more unequal, more insecure, more anxious. Because you can’t smell neoliberalism, filling the air we breathe like a suffocating gas. You can’t hear the sound of tax-revenues draining quietly away offshore.
“It’s a victory for decent people!” cries Farage. Cue Neil Hamilton, slithering on to the stage like a cash-for-questions crocodile. Those of us who are not decent shudder.
It’s difficult to argue that the EU nowadays is great or even progressive – it’s only as good as its component governments, with whom we still need to cooperate to solve some of the messes of the last century, including the migration crisis, runaway tax corruption and climate change.
But how dull is that? Much better to put our energy into bashing migrants, taking to the beaches, to the seas and oceans with gunboats, shooting off salvoes at any leaky rubber dinghies that get too close.
In the end, it’s all just theatre. Johnson will surely go bald one day, Farage will drain his cheeky pint. But as the curtain comes down, alas the body on the stage is all too real. The audience shuffles home, but we – and our children and grandchildren – are stuck for ever on an isolated, sinking and declining little island, wondering how we let this happen.
