Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
BREXIT BLUES
I’m scared.
I admit it.
I’m scared.
Not for Britain, you understand, but for New
Zealand, Australia and Canada.
I know I should snap out of this habit of
providing you with political commentaries. After all, I’m no learned professor
of political science. But there I was about a month ago lecturing you on America’sHindenburg-Hitler Election, the forthcoming United States presidential
election, and now here I am reacting to the Brexit.
I am writing this the day after a (slim)
majority of voters in the United Kingdom chose to leave the EU. You are reading
this a month later.
I am keeping a clear head. I am ignoring the
mutual imprecations and puerilities that are going on between the Exit and the
Remain supporters on Facebook and elsewhere. I am busily urging everyone
to watch, on Youtube, "Brexit - Legally and Constitutionally What
Now?" - a sane and rational talk by Professor Mark Eliot of the Faculty of
Law at the University of Cambridge. In a totally non-partisan way, he spells
out exactly what position Britain is now in with regard to international law
and [though he does not say this] his talk makes it clear that those who voted
for Brexit may not really understand what they have just bought.
But I respect the democratic
process – as David Cameron said he did. I accept that, having won the
referendum, those who supported the Brexit can now reasonably expect to get
what they wanted. I note – not without amusement – that a substantial majority
of Scots, and of the Northern Irish, voted to stay in the EU and this clearly
has serious implications for the United Kingdom and for possible future
Scottish independence. I note too that London voted overwhelmingly to stay in
the EU, which says something about that city’s great cultural diversity now.
Even so, the vote has been
cast so there it is.
But this is where the fear
comes in.
Whatever declared motives
people had for supporting the Brexit, it is clear that much of the Brexit camp
did play to xenophobia, hostility towards immigrants and refugees, and the
daydream that somehow Britain could recover its old status as a Great Power. Before
the Brexit vote, Brexit leaders spoke of the burden of EU regulations and
freeing up the British economy. After the Brexit vote, the likes of
Nigel Farange were a lot more forthcoming about their anti-foreigner stance.
For me, to see on the same platform, and both arguing for the Brexit, the
right-wing Farange and the radical left-wing George Galloway was to sense that
there was something radically wrong with the Brexit case. It is clear that the
Brexit is approved by Vladimir Putin (what could please him more in his own
imperial plans than the disunity of Western Europe?). It is clear also that it
is approved by Donald Trump, who has already used the outcome of the referendum
as fuel for rhetoric about people standing up to “elites”. There is enough here
to fear for Britain.
But what of my declared fear
for New Zealand, Australia and Canada?
It is this. With Britain no
longer in the EU, there will probably be a big push by Britain for closer
British trading tries with the “old” Commonwealth. Many of the Farange mob have
already suggested that they want increase trade with this “old” Commonwealth
and are clearly under the impression that they can resume where they left off
forty years ago.
I doubt if Canada (culturally
partnered more closely with the USA than with Britain) will be much affected by
this. But I have the awful image of more British immigrants, more royalist
flag-waving and more retrogression to a dependent British status, wiping out
much of our developing national independence of spirit.
I hope that New Zealanders do
not choose to be part of such a movement. I hope that a return to an
Anglocentric culture is either resisted or not initiated in the first place.
But there now.
Perhaps the Brexit rhetoric is getting to me. Perhaps none of this will come to
pass. Still, it’s a worry. Especially when New Zealand’s prime minister talks
of initiating new trade deals with Britain.
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