JOHN HUMPHRYS
Yes, I’ve had my doubts. Yes, I voted Remain. But...
SO HOW did you feel when you opened your eyes this morning? A bit let down maybe? no chorus of angels heralding the dawn of our new nation?
or maybe you leaped out of bed with a smile on your face and toasted Freedom day with a nice British cuppa from your ‘I Got Brexit done’ official merchandise mug, to the sound of some rousing Elgar? or maybe not.
As you read this I imagine myself trotting around my local park for my usual early morning run and greeting the dog walkers with a hearty ‘Happy Independence day!’ salute. But I’m not expecting much of a response. Why should there be?
Everything has changed, nothing has changed.
Sure, we will gaze on anxiously as vast teams of trade experts baffle us with the details of their interminable negotiations and hope desperately that in a year from now we’ll still be selling a few bits and pieces to our former partners. But it’s not whether deals will be done. It’s when.
I know common sense is seldom allowed to intrude into these negotiations. After all, the wheelerdealers must preserve their mystique at all costs. But we probably all assume that in the fairground of trade talks it will be more swings and roundabouts than death- defying descents in a theme park rollercoaster. We shall survive.
And anyway it’s not trade that will define us. The big question we face on this new dawn is what sort of country we are going to be. We know we are no longer Europeans but that’s not terribly helpful because we never really figured out what ‘ being European’ meant anyway.
What we do have to worry about is how the rest of the world will view us. Where do we expect to stand in relation to the power blocs of America, China and, yes, the European union?
But I use the word ‘we’ too loosely. It’s not old-timers like me who will dictate our destiny.
It is not those of us who embarked on the Europe adventure all those years ago who will determine our future. It is those who have never known what it is like not to be a part of Europe.
When I think of my own life in the context of Europe I do so through the lens of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man.
STAGE ONE
IN ‘ ALL the world’s a stage’ Shakespeare described the baby ‘mewling and puking’ in the nurse’s arms. I’m told that I was bawling my eyes out in a cardboard box in the cellar of our local chemist’s shop.
It was the only safe place to be when the Germans were dropping bombs on our street in Cardiff, too close to the steelworks and docks to escape the attentions of the luftwaffe.
STAGE TWO
A SMALL boy growing up in poverty in the post-war years. Work for my father was scarce and hunger was never terribly far away. Rationing meant luxuries were non- existent, though one or two families managed to beat the system. We envied and hated them
— especially the boy who lived opposite.
The only fat boy in the street. His father was a butcher and he would saunter out of his house and greet the rest of us with a lamb chop in his hand. He’d take a bite and drop it in the gutter. It didn’t stay there long. And we hated Europeans too — or, at least, the Germans. Same thing really, we thought.
In all the agonised geopolitical psychology about our relationship to Europe, there is a simple root explanation. It is World Wars I and II.
I do not think it is our failure to look beyond the past. It is that the past has shaped us, just as it has shaped Germany. We did not have the same profound need to create a structure of peace and security. We had already fought our battles for that.
STAGE THREE
AN IDEALISTIC teenager. My mother forced me and my siblings to do homework. She was determined we should have the education denied to her and my father — and it worked. We all managed to get into high school. The antiGerman rage of the street was mitigated — to some extent at least — by those teachers who had survived the war and believed the best way to avoid another one was through a united Europe.
Hadn’t Churchill himself made a speech in which he said if Europe were united there would be ‘no limit to happiness and prosperity’? So we must unite!
STAGE FOUR
I WAS 22 when I first went on a plane. It was to dublin and it was to celebrate our honeymoon. I didn’t go ‘abroad’ until three years later. To me, by then, Europe was more of an impression, a romantic and slightly risky concept.
How could we possibly imagine what it might come to mean to working- class kids like me? Somewhere a British prime minister had described as ‘a faraway country of which we know nothing’ would become an easyJet destination, a weekend break, the ideal place for a stag night in its capital Prague.
STAGE FIVE
DISILLUSION had begun to set in. A creeping realisation that the Eu was less ode To Joy and more a gilded carriage on a gravy train for a privileged elite. It meant rules upon rules pumped out by that same elite while the elected, but virtually impotent, Parliament looked on.
Some MEPs did their best but most just sighed a little and got on with enjoying the benefits of lavish pensions and expenses. A budget that was less transparent than the heavily tinted windows of the Commission cars gliding through Brussels.
A political club of privileged bureaucrats with an insatiable lust for power. An economic arrangement which became a political federation.
They wanted integration. Had we really signed up for this? Were we no longer a ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY . ORIGINAL COPY
From war baby to broadcaster enraged by an anti-democratic elite, our brilliant columnist charts his shifting views on Europe – and says he’s filled with optimism on our Brexit dawn
sovereign island nation? I learned another of Churchill’s quotes: ‘If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.’
STAGE SIX
MY OLDER self was now faced with a referendum and a chance to break free. I voted to remain. I persuaded myself that peace in Europe was still the ultimate prize — but had it not already been won? Could I really see German bombs ever again falling on the tiny terraced houses of my childhood?
And in truth, fear of the unknown had probably replaced those high ideals of my youth.
I really did not want to go through a complicated divorce. These are bad enough in our personal lives without landing the country with one. Better stick with the devil you know than risk the deep blue sea. Project Fear was doing its job.
STAGE SEVEN
IN THIS final stage scepticism was replaced with cynicism. The shock of watching patronising patricians trying to subvert the democratic process because they knew better than us poorly educated plebs what was good for us.
The preposterous proposal for a ‘People’s Vote’ was based on the claim that it was the only truly democratic road to take. It was, of course, the negation of that — or at least it would have been had the nation not spotted it for what it really was: an attempt at a parliamentary coup.
dominic Cummings, creator of the brilliant ‘Take back control’ slogan that had tipped the balance in the referendum, invented another one to unleash on the second referendum. It was: ‘Tell them again.’ That became the message of the election. The remainers did not believe it then. They believe it now.
So here we are — celebrating the dawn of the new age.
There is a view out there — so often expressed in The Guardian — that this new age is racist, populist, still sexist. In so many ways shameful. hugh Grant, bizarrely the go- to source for apocalyptic doomsday quotes, says the ‘country is finished’.
really? Isn’t the opposite true? Much of the rest of the world is puzzled by the way that Britain is behaving. But it is also intrigued. The French are really interested in what is going on across the Channel. What is that small island with its extraordinary history up to?
We have been on the right side of history before and I believe we may well be again.
We will not simply revert to the way we were in my youth. We have absorbed so much of Europe — its food, its different cultures, its faiths. The young today travel, study, work, marry in Europe. We can keep the best of all that while breaking free of the bureaucratic dominance, what dominic Cummings terms The Blob.
There are roughly 45 million people in this country who have been members of the European Union all their lives. The vast majority may not speak a single language apart from English but is ‘Europe’ foreign to them? I doubt it. As I write, my house is full of builders trying to put right 20 years of neglect. They’re all Bulgarian. Their English is more than adequate.
All those doomsday prophecies in the immediate aftermath of the referendum about hate crime against Europeans because they were now ‘foreign’ were rubbish. nasty, ill- informed malicious rubbish from people who, for reasons I have never been able to figure out, were determined to see the democratic rejection of a political construct as an expression of racism. one man, we were solemnly informed, was murdered for being foreign. That was a lie.
So if not that caricature, what sort of country are we and how will we be seen in our postindependence era? What does the equivalent of my idealistic young self want Britain to be? do those who have lived their entire lives as citizens of Europe even care about the concept of Britain? do they have Any fear of war? What can we/they realistically hope for from our new reality — putting aside the tedious details of trade negotiations? has our dream of a truly democratic society at peace with itself been permanently damaged by the political ructions of the past three years?
Are we doomed to division and discontent? THE young may care about the cost of housing and getting a decent job but do they care about whether our welfare state is working for all and are they prepared to bear the burden of an ageing population with vast numbers threatened by dementia?
do they really believe the NHS is still (if it ever was) the envy of the world? do they sense that higher education has become a sad joke for millions? Is ‘wokeness’ a fad or a new way of viewing the world?
Is biological sex an outmoded concept and are they relaxed about everyone deciding on their own gender?
do they really believe that if youngsters are not always happy they must be suffering from a mental health ‘ issue’? do young people have an idealistic inner core?
It has taken me a couple of thousand words to say something about the biggest question facing this nation today. The best cartoonists of our time are often able to do it with a single drawing. And the work of the truly greats will live on in our memories. david low was one of those giants. Perhaps his greatest was printed in the Evening Standard in 1940.
It showed a British soldier standing on a rock in the Channel looking up at a squadron of enemy bombers. The caption read: ‘Very well, alone!’
That was our darkest hour but our isolation may suit us again in peaceful times. We can be innovative. We can be imaginative. We can be courageous in the face of threats from beyond our shores and here at home. And we can, sometimes, be generous.
It’s sad there is no eighth age. But maybe not. The future is in the hands of the young.
And I’ll bet they will do no worse than we did.