The intensity of the split between those British citizens who still wish to remain within the European Community and those who are gladly leaving it will, in my opinion (despite a so-called ‘democratic referendum which actually showed that the majority wanted to remain) only increase in its force after this January 31st 2020.
There can be no wait for another general election: the referendum result – although it was merely advisory and although no legitimate quorum was allowed – is speciously moulded in stone; indeed sculpted in Carrara marble for that stalwart band of brits (some even resident in Italy (!!!)) who gladly leave a club from which they felt they never got free drinks, or even any nibbles, a referendum ‘result’ which is truly cast in already rotting concrete mocking all those who care for a Europe that has the integrity and force to stand up and be counted before the mega-economies of China and the US of A.
I can only be grateful that I have chosen to become a member of the European community as my area to live, work and love in and never relinquish my European citizenships. I don’t think I would psychologically last very long in the burgeoning eruption of false economic, trade and social promises which an utterly dishonest quasi-totalitarian police-state regime (labelled ‘airstrip one’ in 1984) is now foisting on an island which our greatest poet once described as ‘This other Eden, demi-paradise’.
Don’t forget Brexit has not been done today …it has barely begun! The worse is yet to come…it will NEVER be done.
The really awful thing is that the leavers are ever more believers in the fatuous righteousness of their decision (just like the cult members of Guiana’s Jonesville – remember that one?) while the remainers are now taking shelter either by leaving the country or by seeking pockets of sanity (like my city of birth and breeding, London).
I am reminded of the harsh criticism in a sonnet by a poet who really cared for his country, William Wordsworth:
England … is become a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
Meanwhile, leavers do enjoy yourselves this Friday night at 11pm!
After forty seven years in which the UK has been lifted from the doldrums of British Leyland-style strikes, power cuts and much else that was grey and loathsome and embraced almost half a century of increasingly successful membership, the sceptered isle leaves the European Union.
You injudicious Brexiteers enjoy your party in college green! There will be fireworks, Big Ben bonging and a rousing address from your beloved leader (sorry….our prime minister). Wonderful speeches are promised by stars like Ann Widdecombe, Tim Martin and Julia Hartley-Brewer all bathed in the Uk’s traditionally forecast drizzle.
As George Orwell wrote in his essay ‘England your England’ (note no ‘Scotland’, ‘Wales’ or ‘Ireland’) – an essay which still has immense value especially that part centred around the word ‘hypocrisy’, especially aptly featured in those brexiteers who have become residents in Italy and deluding themselves of having their cake and eating it.
“…as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic ‘world-view’. Nor is this because they are ‘practical’, as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town planning and water supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis, and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But they have a certain power of acting without taking thought. Their world-famed hypocrisy – their double-faced attitude towards the Empire, for instance – is bound up with this. Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated. The phrase that Hitler coined for the Germans, ‘a sleep-walking people’, would have been better applied to the English. Not that there is anything to be proud of in being called a sleep-walker.”
That ‘nation of sleep-walkers’ sums it up quite brilliantly. Will you accept one of those newly minted ‘celebration’ fifty pence pieces? Will you sleep walk off the white cliffs?
Happily if I ever return to my birthplace, it will be to the inimitable, cosmopolitan and glorious metropolis of London, the city that has given shelter and hospitality to the world’s greatest defenders of freedom (Mazzini from Italy, Ho Chi Min from Vietnam and Marx from Russia just to name three). I would, in my dreams, make London into a free city, Hanseatic league style: a city that stands apart from that crass diminutive mentality so aptly described by Orwell; a city that on a genuine day of sunshine rises proudly astride the great river Thames. As Joseph Conrad (another foreigner, this time from Poland, made welcome by the great Wen) wrote:
What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men and the seed of commonwealths.
I return to Wordsworth who, on Westminster Bridge, wrote:
Earth has not any thing to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
This end of January is truly a day of dark foreboding but we believers in the Community of Europe will never give up, never surrender that which is God-given, the beating heart and unity of one of the world’s great continents. Long live the European Community!
