Our Brexit play is inspired by the shunning of Leavers
When this summer Hayley from Love
Island worried about Brexit destroying trees and stopping people from taking holidays abroad, everybody laughed.
They’re not laughing now, though – they’re too busy worrying about courgettes becoming extinct. Because since Freedom Day moderates have discovered the clammy thrill of “catastrophising” – a word recently made popular in the book The
Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, defined as “the turning of unwelcome events into disastrous ones”.
The educated seem radiant with anger as they detail particularly torrid scenarios which may await us, such as Brexit leading to “super-gonorrhoea” and even scarier reports of a “sperm shortage” in the event of a no-deal Brexit. When we set out to write our Brexit play, People Like Us – which opens next week – one of the things which made us think it would make a grand comedy of manners was the hysterical reaction of liberals who had mocked survivalists for stockpiling tinned food and who now took to it with the zeal of the Spam-crazed convert.
These aren’t legitimate concerns – these are stories told around a campfire to caution and excite in equal parts. But our play is not just a rant against the joy of fuming, entertaining as it is. It’s also an exploration of the natural consequence of this delirious Remainer catastrophising – the Shunning Of The Unbelievers.
We’ve taken a north London book group – merry if a little spiky before the referendum, torn apart afterwards by those who can’t bear to be in the same room as someone who voted Leave. Happily for us, but sad for many, it’s based firmly on real-life experience.
Shunning has become practically fashionable among the chattering classes – indeed, it’s so widespread that it took us about half an hour to collect enough Leaver examples to fill a book. We’ve changed the names because practically no one wished to speak to us on the record for fear of the consequences. However, Sebastian Handley is braver than most, and has described his life as a Brexit campaigner in Brighton in his book How The Nobodies Beat The Somebodies. During the campaign, “We were called Nazis, racists, flat-earthers and knuckle-draggers” and one random man told him, “I should push you under a bus”.
But it was after the vote that things became really nasty. He came home from work to find his wife Vicky crying because all over social media her friends were calling Leavers racist and “a dear old friend of mine said we were the great unwashed”.
Sebastian loves his job in a London architectural practice, but even he kept quiet about the way he’d voted – “With a wife and three children to support, why risk an argument?”
Siobhan works in higher education. “The atmosphere in the office was genial before the referendum,” she says. “But afterwards the Remainers were spitting that we’re all racists and bigots. You can’t argue, you just have to shut up.”
We got an email signed “Yours in the Brexit Closet” from Emma, who works in design and has decided not to talk about how she voted, so hostile is her work environment to Leavers. Remainer workmates, she says, show “disgust that someone might have different views from them”. In her private life too, she’s keeping schtum, having observed a close friend “being abandoned socially by great swathes of Remainers who live in this echo chamber where Brexit is evil and tolerance goes out of the window”.
We felt like agony aunts as the tales came flooding in, and noted that it didn’t take a lot to turn passive shunners into active shunners; Remainers prepared to tell their Leaver friends unambiguously to not show your face in these parts again.
Before the vote, Linda – an educated, articulate writer – posted on Facebook her reasons for voting Leave. “There wasn’t much reaction until Leave won,” she says “then the fury began.” One of her FB friends “ranted about ‘my type’ in a post about racists being responsible”. For weeks, Linda was “in shock at the venom…i felt pretty hurt and battered – particularly at the charges of racism. I was brought up all over the world – India, Pakistan, Yemen, Malaysia.…’
Michelle said that because she’d voted Leave, a friend of 25 years’ standing had refused to come to her birthday party. Jodi had, for years, been a member of a small travel club – ladies who would visit British cities together. It split up, she said, because the Remainers no longer wanted to travel with the Leavers on the grounds that “You want EU citizens to leave the country”. It was no good arguing – people believed what they wanted to believe.
When did so-called tolerant progressives start to assume the worst about their fellow citizens, based on no evidence whatsoever? We’ve been forced to suspect that the malice has been there all along. Sebastian Handley puts it neatly: “A top tactic for Remain was making it an anti-social ‘thought crime’ to disagree with them, because that pre-emptively silenced so many of our arguments.”
It’s a fabulous example of the political turning personal – and that’s what our play is all about.
People Like Us, by Julie Burchill and Jane Robins, is at the Union Theatre London SE1 from Oct 2–20.
‘The Remainers were spitting that we’re all racists and bigots. You can’t argue, you just have to shut up’