Still rueing a blinkered decision

A month and more has passed. The world has moved on. There have been brutal terrorist attacks in Nice and other places.

The much promised collapse of the British economy has not happened and everything has continued to be as normal as normal can be. But I still cannot get my mind around why Brexit has turned out to be such a success.

There were, as we remember, two main strands that pushed the majority of the British to vote for Brexit: the economic argument and the immigration argument.

I can understand that the English, in their majority, do not like foreigners and repeatedly complain that the England they see around them is a far cry from the England they remember.

But then London is the most multicultural place in the country and it voted decisively to remain in the EU.

Ben Judah wrote a book called This is London, which I had quoted some time ago in a story how the Maltese in Soho were kicked out by the Albanians.

There is far more than that in the book. It describes minutely the various foreign components of the kaleidoscope that is London – from Afghans to Ghanaians to Filipinas to Romanians etc. The list is endless.

It describes the dregs of society, the homeless, the Romanians who sleep in the underground passages, those who live in doss houses where they sleep three to a bed, the hardship of Filipina maids under their awful Gulf owners, the vacuous Gulf girls who have to be in by midnight or else their father in the Gulf hears about it, the drug addicts who sell white powder (cocaine) to the middle classes, the Poles who have invaded the building trade and who make good money.

Some soon find out that the real London is not the fictitious London they dreamt about on their long and hazardous voyage from Afghanistan to London but a cold place where it is very difficult to find a job especially if you do not have a marketable skill. Many want to go back to their countries of origin but they borrowed money from money lenders or their families and they just cannot go back.

So they are forced to take the lowest and the most insecure of jobs and every day, rather, very early in the day, they drag themselves to work for a pittance on which they barely survive.

It is true there is the much hyped British Welfare State but these immigrants for the most part do not qualify. They have to be registered first, and many of them are illegal immigrants. They have to give an address and those who are homeless cannot do that.

And yet the Brexit campaigners built on people’s fears, especially in the Home Countries, artfully constructed a scenario that Britain will be soon overwhelmed by immigrants.

Then they somehow tied these fears to the EU. They said Britain has lost control over its borders. The EU wants Britain to take in any EU citizen. Now Ben Judah’s book and any relevant statistics show that only a minority of present day migrants to Britain come from EU countries. If Britain were to kick out all the Poles and the Romanians and the rest of EU citizens, it will still be left with the Indians and the Pakistanis who are Commonwealth citizens and all the rest – Colombians, Filipinas, Afghans, Ghanaians, etc who are not EU citizens.

The most probable prognosis is that Britain will regain control over its borders and that the immigration issue will force Britain to come to no agreement with the EU over membership of the EEA, and be thus forced to descend to the lowest of trade relations, the WTO level, with consequent harm to its industries at least until new trade agreements are negotiated and signed.

We will see how successful Britain will be in shutting its doors to migrants from EU countries. Brexiting from the EU will not automatically mean shutting the doors to any and all migrants, but let us allow Britain that possibility.

I will pass over the argument of who will have to do the humble jobs that the immigrants are holding down, from cleaning the Tube carriages and toilets, to building and sweeping streets.

What intrigues me is the confidence trick that by exiting the EU they would be stopping immigration from EU countries, now and in the future, and that regaining control is worth losing what membership in the EU means – not just trade but being in a continental grouping that seeks to preserve peace in Europe and to ensure a better future for all the citizens in this grouping.

Heaven knows that the EU, as a whole, has not been very successful so far. It has preserved peace in a continent prone to wars, that’s true, but then it bombastically launched a common currency that has proved to be defective in its composition. It has proved to have very porous borders, made even more fragile by the equally bombastic belief it could do without frontiers.

But it has also been a story of coming together, where people, youngsters especially, can travel and study and improve their lot. It has established some very important standards and has brought in social legislation that America can only envy.

True, the single currency and an insistence on austerity above anything else has widened the disparities between the rich north and the poor south. The British vote, though it was not put in these terms, can be read as a refusal of solidarity. But then Germany and its Bundesbank are guiltier on this account than Britain ever was.

There cannot have been many more examples of this but on 23 June the British voted to do untold harm to their economy for the wrong reason – they thought that by shutting the doors of their country they could snap out of the gradual decline of the last years.

They may do so, for this shock can give the economy a burst of energy, but meanwhile they will have dragged the UK out of its natural hinterland that is Europe, an alternative to which ranges from greater Atlanticism to greater isolationism.

But that’s for the future. For now, the mind boggles how a mature and experienced people could allow itself to be so blinkered and led by passion and emotions.