There are so many things about Brexit that make my blood boil. Too many to mention, perhaps. A new one surfaced in the Guardian today where a reporter was despatched to various places to seek people’s views on how Brexit was proceeding. In the Conservative club in Hornchurch in Essex one of their members said this: “I’d rather have no deal… In WWII we were feeding ourselves.” This is a popular view among many people and it’s breathtakingly stupid. And wrong. I take particular exception to it.
In WWII, “we” were most certainly not feeding ourselves. The Liberty ships, on which my father served at the age of 15, sailed across the U-boat infested waters of the North Atlantic in order to bring supplies from America. Many ships were sunk, thousands of sailors died. Rationing was already the norm in WWII. Without people like my father, they would have been facing absolute starvation.
Things were bad enough in Britain so imagine how people across the channel were managing. My mother and her family lived in Rotterdam and lost three homes during the blitz. They lost everything three times over and sometimes there was no food at all. My grandfather, who died before I was born, used to trap birds on the veranda of their flat, which the family would eat, raw, because they had no cooking facilities. This was how people managed in the Netherlands and in countless other places. Some people were not so lucky.
I take all this stuff very personally. I am very proud of my ancestry. My grandparents lived through two world wars, my parents through one. My father was almost killed when a bomb landed close to his school classroom, my mother could have been killed on numerous occasions when the German bombers struck and when the Dutch marines were fighting the German invader literally outside their home. I could go on. I treat the lazy and wildly inaccurate narrative about how “we were feeding ourselves” with dripping contempt. How dare you?
Does my father’s bravery and service count for nothing? Or does the fact that he was the son of a Scandinavian migrant count against him in this increasingly ugly country? Or perhaps my mother should have stayed in the Netherlands; bloody migrant, coming over here, working all her life, never once claiming benefits?
If only the ambitious lying shyster Boris Johnson put “I’d rather have no deal… In WWII we were feeding ourselves” on the side of his pro Brexit bus, we might have had a different result in the EU referendum. But maybe not. With the kind of ignorance demonstrated in Hornchurch, the majority in favour of leave might have been even greater.
