Expat Englishman's Explanatory Essay on Brexit

Straight off a few bits of terminology:-

(1) Expatriate because I was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England.

(2) "Brexit" as in British Exit. Note that it is a British Exit, and absolutely not a European exit. This is a British decision.

(3) Think of Exit as "Separation", "Trial Separation", "Divorce", "Study", "Regrouping" and so on and you'll not go wrong.

1066 (1955)

In 1955 I was at school in Burnley, and just nine years old. Our history teacher bragged that "England hasn't been invaded since 1066", a lie, as every skuleboy kno. Kevin Stroud in his excellent "History of English Podcast" tells us about the Second Norman Invasion . My bigoted father lamented the Invasion By The Blacks which happened while he was busy bringing civilization to Australians in the period 1956-68.

The point here is that I am alive, and my mind was seeded with the concept of English invincibility when I was a child. I grew up outside Australia, so to some extent that image is watered down, but that image would be alive and well had I grown up and lived in England instead of Australia (and France and Canada and Singapore and …). My classmates from SunnyBank school on Manchester Road in Burnley were seeded with that image and are probably mostly alive today. And they were voting back in 2016.

Spanish Armada (1588)

Contrary to schoolboy opinion, the English navy did NOT defeat those Spaniards. The Spanish ships, carrying the Spanish armed forces, were driven off by the South-Westerly gales (think "Gulf Stream and its effects"); the ships (not the men) were blown away into the North Sea, and they escaped by traveling in an anti-clockwise direction around the north of Scotland and towards Ireland where a second set of squalls drove the ships ashore on the rocky coast and blessed the Irish with jet-black hair. (Great map here )

We will never know. We can't go back and live a "what if?" scenario. But the English still cling to the belief that Sir Francis Drake as Vice Admiral won the battle (not Lord Howard of Effingham, who was in charge), and that belief is possibly fueled by Drake's attack the year before on ships in the harbour of Cadiz. Once you get on the best-seller list, sales are fueled by the fact that you are on the best-seller list. (John Grisham's new salamander cooking book will be coming out soon)

Navy and The Great War

Still at SunnyBank, we sang " Eternal Father, Strong to Save " whenever gales were forecast. I suspect that our head mistress and teachers, spinsters one and all, had lost fiancées during the Second World War, and loved lamentations about the Royal and Merchant navies.

The race to build dreadnoughts accelerated in the first ten years of the twentieth century, with gun barrel diameters leaping from twelve inches to fifteen inches. Such a race! Britain began building dreadnoughts for guns that had not yet been tested!

The Germans had been busy widening the Kiel Canal, and we knew why that was!

Britain clung to the "two power" standard - to ensure the Royal Navy was at least the size of the next two largest navies. Think "We are the biggest and we are going to stay that way". England faced Europe, and had her back to the United States, which continued to populate its natural resources with educated immigrants.

June 1978

We touch down briefly in Montrouge. I was sent on contract to Paris. I had never set foot in a foreign-language country in my life, except for almost missing my plane in Bahrain because I stopped in the airport lounge for just-one-more-beer on my way from Adelaide to London.

I spoke no French except "S'il vous plaît", "Merçi", and "Asseyez vous!", which last phrase tells you something about my attention span in sexy Miss Hancock's French class in 1961.

I enrolled in the Library in Montrouge (but only after I stopped looking for "Library" and started looking for "Bibliothèque") and borrowed a book which I thought should be an easy start, a history of England. I was well-versed in the Perfidious Normans. The first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter in the first book I borrowed translates from French as "England is an island and the English are insular". Richard Stammers and Arthur Lee made that quite clear.

The big thing amongst the English people living and working in Paris was to "go home for the weekend" on a cross-channel ferry (ten pounds Gare du Nord to Victoria) or by an air-hop from Orly – to East Midlands Airport if that's where your home was.

Europe on 24th September 2014 At 17:15

I will skip the next hundred years because you have lived through it, mostly, and we next touch down at 17:15 on September 24th 2014, for it was then that I took a photograph ( this page and scroll through photos until you get to 17:15). My caption reads "Just for a minute there I thought we'd lost Wales AND Scotland!".

Wales and Scotland? Well, YES. You had forgotten, hadn't you? Belly-rumblings were coming from Scotland, and significantly "The independence proposal required a simple majority to pass". Wales jumped on the band wagon.

That the referendum on Scottish independence took place in September 2014 tells us that there was a strong movement well before that.

In short, the English didn't want Europe and the Welsh and Scots didn't want the English. Did Europe want the English? I doubt it; The French at any rate seemed to be maintaining a civilized life when I was there in 1978-80, 2014, and 2016.

2016 and 50% Plus One

So to the Brexit vote, and you know about that. At this point we have to ask "What were they smoking?". I remain staggered that a supposedly well-educated nation can base the course of its Ship Of State on a simple majority vote.

Imagine that five of you are touring the USA by car. You set off from New York having agreed to bask on the beach in San Diego. After six days of driving (six motels, eighteen restaurants, ninety meals) you are headed south on highway 5 out of Los Angeles, almost there, and some idiot says "Florida is better", and two others, for a giggle, scream "Yes!". So you take #56 East to #15 South to #52 East to #8 East and #10 East and never get to see Balboa Park or The Coronado Bridge. How stupid is that? Pensacola is over-rated. I've been there.

Ship Of State courses should be conservative; two-thirds majority at least. That doesn't mean that you can't change course, just that a change of course should be taken seriously and have a great deal to commend it. Unless you have preferential voting in your municipal, state, and national elections, consider how cruddy are your politicians.

This page says that the vote was 51.9/48.1%, and The Sun is suspect, so check these figures elsewhere. David Cameron resigned the day after the referendum. Where he sank to no one knows. The Sun's page has a timeline that should get you started.

How Many Deadlines Were There?

The Same Page has a timeline that should get you started, but first pick a number between one and twenty and write it on the wall.

How many deadlines do you think there will be before we arrive at January 2025?

Which is a better form of suicide, (a) jumping off the cliff or (b) chopping off bits of your own body and tossing them over the cliff one piece at a time?

Brexit-Christmas Eve 2014

So here we are. On the eve of yet-another-Christmas/New Year/Brexit. Boris Johnson declares that " … Great Britain … retain tariff-free access to EU markets … would create a “giant free-trade zone” … "

The prime minister … believes the agreement will be the basis of a "happy and successful" relationship with the EU .

" I believe it will be the basis of a happy and successful and stable partnership with our friends in the EU for years to come. "

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson … saying that the U.K. had "taken back control" … we've taken back control of our laws and our destiny, …

There's more, but you can read what you want.

The sobering facts are these: The Chunnel which opened in 1994 has lured a generation of the dis-United Kingdom (please see "Europe on 24th September 2014" above) to travel Europe by hopping on a train at Waterloo and hopping off at Gare du Nord or Marne-la-Vallée. Now there will be queues at passport checkpoints with the great unwashed public. I will no longer roam Europe under the protection of my British passport (thanks Liz!), but will be as much a foreigner as any other national. Even my Canadian passport will put me at the level of loud-mouthed tourists from Orangeville.

"A giant free-trade zone" does not make life easy. Bonavista is a free-trade zone; that means that David can charge me whatever he likes to do carpentry, take it or leave it. Likewise the price of cans of tomato paste trucked in to Foodland.

"A happy and successful relationship" is how I would describe my relationship with my ex-girlfriend – we no longer speak to each other at all, and therein lies peace.

I live alone and can proudly boast that I have taken back control of my destiny, but at times I wish there were someone I could turn to and ask "Does this tie make me look fat. Or old?"

Boris's claims might be accurate, but that doesn't mean that they are healthy.

Currency

I will end on a brief comment about currency. On Thursday September 18th 2014 I sat in a café in Rambouillet and studied coins of the Euro Currency. In the photo I show one side of the coins, marked with a large "1" or a large "50" and so on. The reverse of each coin carries a national symbol, the Spanish Euros being proudly different from the French Euros which are different from the Italian Euros which – well you get the idea. No matter where you are in Europe, if a bagel in France is €1.2 and a bagel in Spain is €1.1 then you know that French bagels are more expensive, and that Italian bagels at €1.0 are cheaper. None of this requires you to look up today's exchange rate.

The English, of course, chose not to adopt the €uro, stuck to the pound sterling (which has been sinking beneath the waves to its current near-par with the U$ from a rate of about 5:1 some two hundred years ago). That is, the English were never really, fully in the European Union. The other nations were, of course, they all adopted the standard currency, and appear to have standardized everything else.

On top of that the Italians kept their Lambrettas, the French retained their Gallic shrug, the Swiss kept ticking along, and the Germans kept on making rules.

The English appear to have wanted the fruits of the tree without committing to being part of the workforce that kept the orchard weed-free.

No more free apricots at lunchtime for the British.

This Just In : Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla Mail. … It also recommends using systems that are now vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The text cites "modern e-mail software packages including Outlook, Mozilla Mail as well as Netscape Communicator 4.x." The latter two are now defunct - the last major release of Netscape Communicator was in 1997 .

I give up!

Thursday, December 31, 2020

OK. This is absolutely my last word on the topic: On the last day of the year, the day before the gong sounds for the first round, BBC news answers your questions.

" Brexit: How will it affect my holiday to Spain? And other questions ". Apparently some British people have bought property – homes – in Spain and are now curious about whether they will still be able to pop across and make a cuppa.

"Pets" and "health Insurance" come into it too. "The government says that all EHIC cards will remain valid until their expiry date, which is printed on the card. After that, the UK will issue a new card called the UK Global Health Insurance Card (GHIC), but there are no details yet on how it will work or how to obtain it".

Now you can call me a cynic, but it seems to me that these sorts of questions should have been posed, and answered honestly, well before 23 June 2016. I believe that the atmosphere in 2016 was charged with flag-waving patriotic statements about "regaining our sovereignty" and the like. Of course the trouble with "independence" is that when things go wrong, you are horribly on your own. Of course, for most people, their problems, whatever their nature, only last until their expiry date, and after that, as the BBC says, we don't really know what happens.

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