As a Remainer, I choose Brexit hope over hatred
On the bus this week, my daughter spotted a woman wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the picture of a unicorn, the words “I don’t believe in Brexit” written in cute bubbly writing across its body. “Mummy, what is Brexit?” she asked, a query I had begun to dread more than “Why is the sky blue?” or “How do babies get here?”. But it was inevitable, this question, and perhaps the most surprising thing about it was that she hadn’t asked it sooner, given the spongelike nature of children.
I sat on the top deck and tried to work out how best to answer her. To simplify things – because she is six, and she doesn’t understand what the European Union is – I told her that it meant we were leaving Europe. Her eyes clouded with shock. Her lip trembled. And then she started to wail, a loud, piercing sound that made me want to bundle the both of us off the bus so as not to disturb the other passengers. “I DON’T WANT TO LEAVE EUROPE,” she sobbed. “WHY CAN’T WE STAY?” Her chest heaved in misery.
The woman in the unicorn/ Brexit T-shirt turned and smiled at me. “We all feel the same way, honey,” she said, trying to comfort my daughter, who clearly believed we were about to be frogmarched from our home and made to live in some strange and distant world. “We all feel the same.”
But the thing is, we don’t all feel the same. Not at all. I did not vote to leave the EU, am what has come to be termed a Remainer, and yet I am relieved we have finally extricated ourselves from the European Union. That after four years of anger and public rancour, we can finally move on, stop whingeing and moaning and venting fury and get on with the hand that has been dealt.
Like the woman in the unicorn T-shirt, I didn’t want Brexit… but I certainly believe in it. For it is here, now, happening, and instead of inhabiting a world of makebelieve, where unicorns run freely and Nigel Farage does not exist, wouldn’t it be better if we accepted reality and allowed politicians to get on with making Brexit work as best as they can?
This is the strange thing about some Remainers, the ones who seem to be behaving with less emotional sophistication than my six-year-old daughter. In their self-righteous anger and their moping, immature misery, they want everyone to be as despairing as them. Yesterday, a liberal friend posed a perfectly reasonable question on Facebook about what could be learnt from Brexit, and the response was, by and large: “How could you be so insensitive, this isn’t appropriate, we are in mourning?” Remainers who announce that they would like to move forward, who suggest that this wallowing doesn’t serve anyone, are told that they may as well be flinging faeces at a funeral (I am politely paraphrasing an exchange I actually saw on Facebook this week). The message from these people is: moving on is not a privilege most normal, decent, caring people will have once they are screwed over by Brexit… as if wanging on for hours about the subject on social media is.
Here’s the thing that often gets forgotten about in the echo chambers of Westminster and Twitter: most people couldn’t give a rat’s behind about Brexit any more, as long as it gets done with minimum disruption to their lives. We just want everyone to stop talking about it. We want to feel like progress is happening; we want action, not words.
A week before the referendum, I wrote a column about the increasing intolerance of democratic decisions. “If there is one thing I fear more than Brexit, then it is the bleating, bellyaching reaction to it,” I wrote. “While we cannot know what we will wake up to on Friday, we can be certain that if it’s a decision to leave the EU, then the caterwauling from the self-declared good people of the Left will start in earnest, and like a bad case of tinnitus, it will not stop for weeks.”
Oh, how optimistic that feels now. Weeks! Ha ha! Arch-remainers have had almost four years now to caterwaul and, for the good of their own mental health, it is time to move on to the next stage of grief, the one marked “acceptance”. For at this stage of proceedings, this sulking is the political equivalent of moping over pictures of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston at the SAG awards the other week, hoping against hope that they will get back together.
It’s over, people. Done. Kaput. Brexit has happened, and though some may not like it, they had better start believing in it, for only then can we all start to make things better.