NEVER LET ME GO
Why Brexit is a bad idea: ever since the British referendum result of June 2016 to exit the European Union, Sarah Mower, like millions of other Britons, has been protesting against it. Here this hearfelt Remainer decries the UK’s sorry state.
“I was really rather enjoying 60 years of lasting peace.” When I went on the first of many pro-European marches against Brexit on 26 March 2017, I saw this awfully polite but deadly accurate slogan being waved on someone’s home-made placard, and it has stayed with me ever since. The funny thing about the Br itish is that we don’t riot when we’re politically upset (well, not so f ar). But when the UK referendum result swung to leave Europe, the quietly incensed 48 per cent who wanted to remain came out on the streets, again and again, to demonstrate our views and show how much we love everything about being part of it. I just want you to know that.
The man with his placard who saw peace as the point that should hold Europe together surely holds the strongest card (I just cannot use the ter m “trump” any more...) in any discussion, in any language spoken in any member country. Isn’t it surely the mechanism that ought to be able to prevent national disagreements from escalating into countries arming to attack one another again?
The problem is that “Europe” has come to mean faceless, heartless and distant bureaucracy in the minds of so many – forgetting so quickly that our g randparents’ generation actually conceived a united European community to heal the wounds caused by the r ise of dictatorships and militarism in the 20th century. They did not want such terrible things ever to happen to us.
I realise now that London is actually the utopia of Europe. It’s impossible to count the number of European threads that are woven into the f abric of this city, making it the beautiful, modern, culturally vibrant place it has become since we joined the EU. My next-door neighbours are Spanish on one side and French on the other. Across the street is a German family. The local builders and plumbers are Polish, Romanian, Serbian and Ir ish. I go to a Portuguese cafe for coffee every morning. The point is, we’re so mixed up together, and take each other’s character and talents so much for granted, that we only think of everyone as “Londoners”. While benefitting from and enjoying the luck we’ve had in the transfor mation of this city from the grim place it was in the Seventies, we have never thought to “count” who is of what nationality. That is what I hate about Br exit – this awful “noticing” of who comes from where, and who is supposed to “belong” where. When all this time we’ve all just been Londoner s, Europeans from 28 countries, with absolutely no question about belonging or not belonging.
London, I want you to know, voted overwhelmingly to stay in Europe. Where I live, in Hammersmith and Fulham, 56,188 people voted to stay compared to 24,000 who said they wanted to leave.
My three children cried when they heard the news. It was the first time my youngest two had voted, and they stood in a massive queue, waiting in line with citizens and neighbours of all ages and ethnic backg rounds to do so. My kids saw it differently. They were immediately worried not just that their European friends might abandon London, but that they themselves might now not be welcome, or free to travel, study and work in the countr ies of Europe.
Brexit is an appalling mistake.We are ashamed and sorry about it, even if we never caused it. Most of all, we love Europe and pray that the peace it has created reigns forever.