Why 10th September 2023 should be a date that marks the start of something better
The referendum vote on Britain’s continued membership of the EU took place on 23rd June 2016 but it wasn’t until midnight on the 31st January 2020 that we finally cut our ties. That’s a total of 1,317 days spent in bitterness, argument, turmoil, and chaos. For those who still wanted to leave come 2020 it was, at last, a victory. For those of us who wanted passionately to remain it was heartbreaking.
On that last evening I was pub crawling around London with my eldest son, who had voted leave. We were therefore an odd couple on the streets that night. He had cast his vote not out of racism or ill informed prejudice but for reasons which would have chimed with one of his heroes, Tony Benn. For him Europe as represented by the EU was part of a wider problem, along with international corporations and other social structures that in his view were treating ordinary people as lab rats and slowly eroding all that was good in the traditions of each individual country. We had argued it out over the three and a half years in a way that allowed our love to live alongside our difference of opinion.
We ended up in Westminster mid evening where there were crowds of thuggish, fat, union jack clad men mingling with the general population. A few individuals were dressed comically and floridly, or had faces painted. There were banners and flags but actually the crowds were thinner than I expected. It certainly did not feel big, well organised or even particularly triumphant.
We went to a pub called The Feathers with which I have a long history. It is a typical wood panelled boozer, unremarkable but fairly large. My first marriage over thirty five years earlier had seen us partying in an upstairs room. Tonight was, for me, on this occasion a wake and I was also feeling a little bit bolshy. So when we found a seat and my son went off to the bar, I took off my jacket and my jumper to display my “I am a European and always will be” t shirt in the hope that I could at least enjoy a good argument with someone before the witching hour.
Nothing happened. A couple of seedy looking union-jacked up middle aged men with beer bellies were, with the typical irony of the leave voter, drinking French lager advertised by Stella Artois glasses. They sneered at me and started talking loudly, for my benefit, about how great it was to be finally leaving. My son came back with our pints of English bitter, laughed at my t shirt, and told me I was a plonker for being so provocative.
What happened next is best illustrated by quoting directly from my journal for that evening:
The pub was full of Union Jack carrying brexiteers heading off to the “celebrations” for Brexit which was totally like watching turkeys decorating a Christmas tree. Fortunately for us we were approached by a lovely German couple who liked my “I am still European” t shirt and who completely ruined my plans for a dignified exit from Europe. Several beers and more whiskies later I staggered out of the pub and hailed a taxi to Waterloo, leaving Strider still extolling the virtues of Charlemagne to our bemused fellow Europeans. I was in a taxi when we formally departed the EU and didn’t give AF. Brexit is bollocks and people are people. Beer is beer. We shall overcome etc.
So that was the 31st January 2020, 1,317 days after the momentous vote. Boris Johnson had been elected PM and the first whispers of the Covid pandemic that was yet to come were being reported. We all know how the next three years panned out, both as tragedy and as farce.
Fast forward to the present day and it occurred to me that things might start to get better now that we had put some distance between us and that fateful referendum result. It seems incredible that nearly seven years have elapsed. I thought about those 1,317 days of torment and did the maths. 1,317 days from the first of February 2020 would take us to 10th September this year. That, to my mind, seemed as good a time as any to start the process of picking ourselves off the floor as a country. Brexit has lost all credibility. The economy is in tatters not least because leaving the EU robbed us of so much of the resilience that we could have had from still being in it. That would have helped us to cope with the pandemic and the subsequent war in the Ukraine. Instead we are seeing the long tail of continued loss of business and damage to the economy that distancing ourselves from our closest trading partners has bought with it. If 31st January 2020 formally marked our decline after 1,307 days in hell, maybe on the 10th September this year we should take that same number and start to demand an upward trajectory.
One of the issues we now have is that despite Brexit’s total loss of credibility, and despite the complete discrediting of the right wing movements and individuals that engineered it, respectable politicians are still failing to be brave enough to say what most of us will readily acknowledge. It was a con. It was a deceit. The last seven years have been a mess, a triumph of egos over common sense. Our leaders, across the whole political spectrum, need to start standing up and saying so and stop being coy. The leave movement never had a problem standing up for what it believed in. It lied and beguiled and manoeuvred but it was never shy. Now we need someone with courage to start the journey to take us back to normality.
I am not asking for anyone to stand up and say Brexit was wrong and we need to rejoin the EU as soon as possible. I simply want people like Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak to “grow some” as they say and take on the right wingers who do not speak for the majority of the population by saying: this isn’t working. We need to start trading with Europe again. We need to reforge our cultural links. We need common sense arrangements that will give us back access to Europe markets, research funding, and normal travel arrangements. No-one has to sloganise. They just have to advocate for letting Britain do what it has done best in the past – be involved with Europe and respected by it, not disconnected from it.
So let’s start a new movement that marks 1,317 days beyond that fateful day of 31st January 2020. The 10th September Movement. A day when we start to move forward again, not in a way that revisits and reopens old wounds, but in a way that says: we are undeniably Europeans and always will be.
Eyecatching 