The week that families went to war again over Brexit
The chaos in Westminster has exposed political divides closer to home – but, says Kate Spicer, there are ways to keep the peace
Afew days a week, 64-year-old Sandra Seddon, a retired nurse, travels an hour from her home in Stoney Stanton to look after her daughter’s children. This week, she arrived to find her two-year-old grandson had picked up a few new words, which he proudly repeated to his staunch pro-brexit grandmother. “Order! Ordaaaah!” he said, doing a fine impression of the Speaker, followed up with a shriek of “Stop the coup!” His mother, Emma Hunnyball, 37, a Remainer so enraged by Brexit that she has become a Liberal Democrat activist, had taught her toddler words to wind up Granny.
Later on, as the family gathered around the telly to watch the emergency debate in the Commons, there was “some lively debate”, says Hunnyball. “Then Mum left the room. I knew I’d have to turn it off so we could all sit together.”
We’ve all got them: family, close friends, whose views totally diverge when it comes to the dreaded B-word, with tensions that have risen steadily since the referendum three years ago and spiked dramatically in recent weeks as prorogation and a possible general election loom. My family is split, as is Boris Johnson’s.
His sister Rachel is so anti-brexit she fled the family’s traditionally Tory nest to become a Lib Dem and then, briefly, a candidate for Change UK.
For Hunnyball, proroguing is “an affront to democracy”; Seddon, on the other hand, thinks Johnson is merely “trying to get things done”.
Suki Gray’s family has been subject to the same divide. When the Yellowhammer documents were leaked, sparking fears of food shortages, her Leaver dad joked that they should savour the pomegranate and kale salad they were eating. “In front of his grandchildren he said that, ‘you might need to get used to not having exotic fruit and veg for a while’,” she recalls.
Whether his comment was droll or infuriating depends on your political position. While Dad chuckled, Gray grimaced. “I think we are like a lot of families: split by Brexit, desperately seeking some common ground, but so far, failing. I don’t even know why we bother to argue any more. We are all so entrenched in our views.”
Since prorogation entered the daily lexicon, simmering fury has come back to the boil. Families split down Brexit lines who had until now Waking up to the referendum result was like a punch to the gut: horror, disbelief and then anger. My phone didn’t stop beeping messages from my peers and family members – all as devastated as I. But not Mum. I was shocked to discover her vote was Leave. It caused an undeniable divide. Family arguments became so heated, we had to ban the subject.
Three years on and the country is in an undeniable mess. That’s one thing Leavers and Remainers – and Mum and I – can agree on. Is this current stifling of democratic debate what people voted for? I don’t think so. Is this what my mother wanted? I sincerely hope not. Her side won by only a very slim majority – through lies, half-truths and playing on insecurities and prejudices. At no point was no deal touted as a likely outcome – and I’m relieved she says she never wanted that. The referendum, which should never have happened, has cost our country its unity and divided families, sometimes terribly. The whole thing makes me so angry.
I have always felt both British and European and now one of those identities is being taken away from me – and for what? I’m raging about the choices being taken away from my children because of a vote by an older generation, including my own mother, who won’t have to live with the consequences.
I just cannot understand Mum’s view. When I was growing up she was always politically Left of centre. Early memories include marches against the poll tax and student loans. Feisty and articulate, she was never afraid to stand up for what was right, admonishing rich family friends when they displayed a boorish lack of understanding of what life was like for those less fortunate. She was my hero.
But this? She is wrong, and it has been painful to feel embarrassed by her views (expressed on Facebook) for the first time in my life. I love her very much, but in a small way I do blame her for the mess we are in. Not fair, I know, but
I can’t help it. agreed to disagree, or just kept shtum, have found the news too incendiary to ignore. As I asked around for lighthearted stories about family divisions, more often than not, those that came back were far from jolly.
A sad business consultant revealed that his mother had not seen her grandchildren for nearly two years, following a huge argument about the Common Agricultural Policy; a colleague described a row with his family’s Leave contingent: “We cannot sit in the same room after a drink without it erupting. Last time I left after my brother-in-law shouted, ‘Farage for PM!’ in my face. I stood up and shouted back, ‘I am SO glad you’ll be dead soon, you archetypal GAMMON’.”
In a Yougov survey of 2,380 people published last week, 40 per cent of Remainers said they would be upset if their child married a Leave supporter, versus only 11 per cent of Leave parents who felt that way about Remain. This suggests that the Leave side is in fact the more tolerant. Perhaps being on the winning side puts one in a more cheerful mood. Two friends tell me they have walked out of blind dates after finding out they do not share Brexit persuasions.
It’s true that relationships are tested by extreme differences. After the Referendum in 2016, Relate, the relationship counselling service, said one in five of their staff was dealing with couples that counted Brexit among their differences. Today, Gurpreet Singh, a counsellor for the charity, says differences over the result aren’t the only problem, but “anxieties about what will happen to them after Brexit”, too.
One Leaver, who asked to remain nameless, is a “proud Brexiteer” and her husband “a shouty Remainer”. “We nearly separated over it,” she says. “The way we sorted out our relationship was neither of us mentions Brexit, or ‘The Situation’ and we switch off the news when we are together.” He listens to the radio when he is in his car alone, while she reads up online – but the couple’s truce is an uneasy one. “I sometimes feel that I really can’t be with him any more,” she admits.
A taste of quite how divided we were going to become as a country came in a group email set up by my dad who, like Stanley Johnson, has six offspring, in the spring of 2016. He began the thread in order to find out how each of his kids was going to vote in the referendum so he could vote with the majority. “Remain,” I piped up, as did two other siblings. We were in for a landslide, I assumed.
Dad admitted to being undecided, but leaning towards Leave. Cue major shock. Dad? My Daddy? Leave? How could he? I just assumed every single Spicer would vote the same as me. Then a brother admitted he would be voting Leave, and a sister, too.
You’ll forgive the lack of names
– no one wants to pick at this particular scab in public. My Leave sister remembers feeling hurt when my Remain sister compared her to someone “who goes on Jeremy Kyle”.
My Leave-voting brother got it in the neck from me and I fired off an email to his other half in fury, who was more reasonable. “I am not necessarily right. The man I love and respect is entitled to his vote,” she said. But as time went on, and Brexit turned to one, two, three years of chaos, she says that in the hell of the fallout, “I’d hoped he’d admit to regretting it.” When he did not, “I was physically shocked”.
Brexit has both exposed fissures and created them in families. I asked Rachel Johnson about life in her divided family: she described it – opaquely – as “a picnic”, on the very day protesters rallied outside Downing Street.
“All this is like a game of poker to the politicians,” muses Seddon. “You’d be mad to fall out with your family because of Brexit. We have to agree to differ.”
She has promised to babysit while her daughter goes on the Remainer march in October, and when she stands for the Lib Dems in the local elections. There is a line, however. “I’ve told her, if you become prime minister, don’t expect me to vote for you.” Annoying your children… it goes with the territory. But upsetting them? That is a much more painful reality to deal with. According to my son (a Remainer): “You’re in one trench, Mum, and we’re in the other. Nothing to be done about it.” We’ve always had healthy discussions about politics; now it has alienated me from two people I adore.
I completely understand why so many people voted to remain in the EU – by far the “safest” option, not to mention that I’ve always loved the cultures of Italy, France, Spain and the rest, and set two novels in Romania. Europe is our great continent; the trouble is, to people like my adult children, it only means the EU. I wish David Cameron had never called the wretched referendum, but know that the movement towards it was driven by a powerful groundswell hard to resist. I see life in shades of grey – not, like my children, in black and white.
They didn’t bother to ask why their highly intelligent mother had voted Leave. Or why I had voted against continuing membership of the EEC back in 1975; how my Euroscepticism became so deep. In the Seventies, I was a member of Labour and the respectable Left-wing position (me and Corbyn and Benn, side by side!) was that an unelected capitalist cabal wanted to take away our sovereignty. Observing the sclerotic bureaucracy and fat-cattery of Brussels and Strasbourg,
I still feel that way.
It shocked me that my children have lumped me with “little England” racists who had allegedly “stolen” their future – and their children’s prospects – from them. How dare they! They gave my thoughtfulness no credit, and I found that depressing. I was always a pretty soft Leaver, but have found myself amazed by die-hard Remainers, furious at their snobbery.
My tactic now is to forbid the subject at family meals. But Kitty thinking I should vote the way she wants me to? No way, Daughter. I continue to think for myself, and I hope you do, too. But with a more open mind.
‘We nearly separated over it. Neither of us mentions Brexit – we switch off the news’
‘I LOVE MUM BUT, IN A SMALL WAY, I BLAME HER FOR THIS MESS’ BY KITTY DIMBLEBY
‘I’M SHOCKED THAT MY KIDS THINK I’M A LITTLE ENGLANDER’ BY BEL MOONEY