The first time I voted was in the 1975 The United Kingdom European Communities membership referendum. I voted to join because even then, as an untravelled and innocent young man, I loved Europe. Indeed, how could I not given my Anglo/Dutch/Scandinavian bloodline? My mother was Dutch, my father English, but of a Swedish father born in Norway. I grew up a proud Englishman in a country I knew to be my own. I have never been to the land of my paternal grandfather, Alfred, but the Netherlands, and Rotterdam in particular is always ‘home’ when I arrive there. I am heartbroken that some 45 years later, Britain’s have decided to pull up the drawbridge to Europe and now, when I visit the land of my mother, I arrive as an alien, a foreigner.
This essay is not meant to go over the same old arguments that have divided and indeed broken Britain. The lies of the Vote Leave and Leave EU campaigns are in the past now. I am sure they had an effect on the result but I fear they had a far greater effect on our politics ever since. All my life, people have referred to politicians as opportunist, ambitious, unprincipled liars. Undoubtedly, some were, though not all. Yet by the time of the 2016 EU referendum, the most popular politician in the land was Boris Johnson, the most opportunistic, ambitious, unprincipled liar British politics has seen in my lifetime. The bigger the lie, it appeared, the more popular he became. By the end of 2019, Johnson had lied his way to a landslide election victory for the Conservative party.
Johnson is, first and foremost, an English nationalist, a believer, if he believes in anything at all, in the myth of English exceptionalism. The xenophobia and racism that permeated throughout the Leave campaign was not new to England, but the main protagonists of Brexit fed the beast. By the time the UK voted to leave the EU, many had been convinced that both the EU bureaucrats and migrants and general were the cause of all our problems. If we were to go it alone we could make our own laws and we could stop foreigners simultaneously coming over here taking our jobs and claiming our benefits. The gross inequalities across the land could be addressed if only we gave Johnny Foreigner a kicking. It wasn’t true but Johnson and the like knew that if they could get away with little white lies, why not just tell whoppers? And millions loved him for it. They still do.
It made me feel terrible. I know how my grandfather and his brothers had come to Portishead at the turn of the last century to set up the Mustad Nail factory. How would they have been greeted by the Johnsons and Farages if they had been around? It’s only a hypothetical image but my grandad was a gentle soul who worked all his life, indeed well into his seventies. No one in my family has ever claimed unemployment benefits, yet here he was coming over here working hard and creating jobs (and wealth). Sorry, coming over here, taking people’s jobs. And he had a funny name. Johansen. What kind of name is that?
Similarly, my mother. Neeltje Verburg was her name. A girl out of Rotterdam with no qualifications and no obvious skills married Anthony Johansen, the British Norwegian, contaminating the nation’s bloodline. No true Brits here and I was a combination of both of them. I can imagine a 20th century nicotine-stained Man Frog – that’s Nigel Farage to you and I – prowling at British ports, waving a Union Flag at them and telling them to fuck off back to where they came from. It didn’t happen, although their accents and names were often met with critical stares, but today, who knows?
My wild imaginings make this Brexit stuff very personal. My paternal grandad and my mother were bona fide foreigners who migrated here. When people blame migrants for our country’s ills, they are indirectly blaming my family, even me. And I’m not exaggerating. The xenophobia that turned Farage into the most successful politician of our generation is an attack on every single person who is not the purest Englishman. And he made racism acceptable.
Brexit as a thing is over. We made our decision to go it alone because we think we are exceptional and better than anyone else and certainly far better than those migrants who came over here. I don’t think that’s true at all, but I’m in a minority. And because of my heritage, I’m probably not pure enough to have a view on it.
