So Long, Farewell England…

By Joseph Earp

Although I have lived in Australia for some fourteen years, up until today England always felt like my home.

I haven’t set foot in the place for half a decade. But the country is with me, in strange, subtle ways – as recently as last week I was angrily complaining to my girlfriend about the Eddie McGuire scandal. “That level of sexism just isn’t tolerated, in the UK”, I said. “It just wouldn’t happen. That open bigotry is shouted down.”

Britain’s actions today haven’t just proven me to be arrogant and elitist, they’ve proven me to be hilariously out of touch. The Britain I knew – the Britain in which gawking James Bond villains like Nigel Farage were derided rather than respected – has died. It no longer exists. It has changed, irreversibly, and as it collapses over the next decade we will fill the hours by arguing why it collapsed rather than how it collapsed. That will be obvious – uncommonly so. It’s rare to be able to highlight a single decision as one that toppled a nation. But that’s exactly what happened today. Britain didn’t jump. Britain was pushed.

There will be a torrent of foreseeable and unforeseeable horrors associated with this decision. Some are already coming to light, and the sun hasn’t even yet set on our newly independent UK. The pound is performing worse than it has since 1985. It will continue to plummet. Jobs will be lost. Savings will be decimated. Other countries will elect to leave the EU. The centre will not hold. And then the unforeseeable horrors will kick in – the pains and losses we cannot yet conceive of.

But put aside every single one of those calamities. Put aside the whats, and look at the why. Look at the why, and weep. Because although those who voted Leave will argue they did so for a litany of acceptable sounding reasons, they will be lying. Mostly to themselves.

Why did Britain leave the EU? Because Britain has become a profoundly racist country. Because ever so slightly more than half of the nation allowed themselves to be adapted and altered by Farage, a big-toothed bigot who claimed the independence was achieved without ‘a single shot being fired’, callously unwriting the murder of MP Jo Cox.

Britons are scared – of ISIS and the Middle East and North Korea and terrorism and job loss and a thousand other horrors that they can’t put a name to. Horrors they believe they can stop by going down a route with all the subtlety and forethought one takes when they jump out of a fucking window.

It’s not the Britain I remember. The Britain I remember was proudly multicultural. The Britain I remember embraced cultural difference, and heritage, and change, and development. It was a Britain that was my home, even when I spurned its shores and elected to live on the other side of the world.

It’s not anymore. It’s just a sad scrap of civilisation actively undoing itself – a slow march of millions of people, none of whom have yet realised quite how close the cliff face is to their feet.