Home thoughts inspired by Brexit
IT’S scary, isn’t it, that in the two years since we voted to leave the EU there are still so many people who have absolutely no idea what will actually happen at 11pm on Friday, March 29, 2019.
What’s more terrifying is that most of Theresa May’s Cabinet seem to be among them.
In the last two weeks, as the hysteria has been ramped up and we’ve had at least one key vote postponed and seen the Prime Minister see off her critics and retain the confidence of two thirds of her MPs, there has been blanket coverage and analysis of Brexit and all its implications.
So there shouldn’t be any excuse for any of us not being up to speed on the subject. And yet...
On The One Show the other day, the BBC’s four most senior Brexit experts all sat on the sofa together and, despite their combined wisdom and impressive communication skills, all appeared incapable of condensing the issue into anything the common man (me) could understand.
At the end of the segment, they were all invited to write their prediction for how it would turn out on a
“We’re going home in midMarch,” said Pete, a retired builder from Leicester who, with his wife Janet, has been spending winter in Spain for the past 15 years. “We don’t want to be here when we leave,” he added. “It’s going to get messy.”
“In what way?” I asked. “Oh, you know,” he said, “queues at the ferry ports, the pound crashing against the euro, that sort of thing.”
“We’re the same,” said Roger, an ex-copper and, as a former district councillor in his native Devon, the closest thing out here to a politician. “My wife has a heart condition and I can’t risk not being able to use the E111 card.”
Others are going home early because of fears of food shortages, banana republic-style price rises and inflation and a vague notion that there will be antipathy towards the British over here (unfounded as far as I can tell; most other Europeans I’ve spoken to just feel sorry for us and the mess we’ve got ourselves in).
To my mind, I almost feel that if the zombie apocalypse they’re predicting back home even fractionally materialises, I’d rather stay here.