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THE EUROPE ISSUE

Brexit: AA Gill argues for ‘In’

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting
a line of that most pernicious and debilitating Little English
drug, nostalgia

AA Gill

June 12 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY M AG DA A N TO N I U K

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It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me.
She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue,
every co ee shop, outside every school in every parish council
in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-
made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof
English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s
 mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted:
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“All Ioctober
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my country back. Give me my country back.”

It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience
erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from
what? Back from where?”

Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the

outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what
they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from
Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future,
back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and
country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and
football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to
vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar
and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars
called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket
and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a
Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference
and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and
biting your lip and su ering in silence and patronising
foreigners with pity.

We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s

snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little
English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured,
collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was
better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place
now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we
achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us
have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely
as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as
good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch
on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a
cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better
than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White
Cli s and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a
Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.

The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a

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brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shu e back to

a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy,
the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours
foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-
congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.

And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position,

then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of
inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in
Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all
 the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s
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the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of
John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his
bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts
in his shed.

All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the

humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their
collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope
that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to
the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold
pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen
Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a
thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called
the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land
Rovers and top hats and She eld plate teapots.

There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the
EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s
because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They
don’t recognise half the stu I’ve mentioned here. They’ve
grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.

The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from

them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a
phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has
gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from
political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to
health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies,
they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those
newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr.
What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the
tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers,
or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call
centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password
that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more
than eight digits.

“
 Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is
wednesday october 3 2018
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worse now than at some point in the foggy
past where we achieved peak Blighty

We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re
going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe
insouciance that what they’re o ering instead of EU
membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your
ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the
house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-
laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but,
you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see
other people on the side.

Really, that’s their best o er? That’s the plan? To swagger into
Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re
looking nice today. Would you like some?”

When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers
reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still
really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not
Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners
and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of
course they’re going to want to go on making the free market
with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense,
doesn’t it?”

Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not
going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving
Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead
to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the
niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and
thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are,
of course, weak points for us. The tortuous renegotiation with
lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces
always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re
supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to
do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we
didn’t notice not having it in the first place.
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Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’

You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my

arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I
seem to know how to make a sou é and I’m bu with the
power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care
about; it makes not a jot of di erence to you or me if the
Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in
wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits
without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as
many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.

Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that

makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The
more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the
rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and di erent
opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s
not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming
up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage
of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to
protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and
cheated.

The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU.
The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will
be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life,
there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud
to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my
nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything
 else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can
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into any gallery on our continent and completely
understand the images and the stories on the walls. These
people are my people and they have been for thousands of
years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark
Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century
France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained
to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments
to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the
rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque,
neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism,
cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all
European movements and none of them belongs to a single
nation.

No time for walls: the best of Europe, from its music and food to IM Pei’s pyramid at the
Louvre, depends on an easy collision of cultures
GETTY

There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian

handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This
European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest,
most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius
that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to
us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture
and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and
that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes,
 may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and
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European expertise and imagination that has
made it all so very appetising and exciting.

The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first

one in Paris was called The London Bridge.

Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of
creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive
lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a
place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it
harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can
build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture,
this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands
of years, has made everything we have and everything we are,
why would you not want to be part of it?

I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our

library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even
think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old,
philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in.

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Duncan Campbell
D
· 30 DECEMBER, 2016
This is why the Remainders lost: all insults; no arguments. 

REPLY 5 RECOMMEND

John Shields Duncan Campbell 13 JUNE 2017