European Union

Immigration: the pros – and the big con

It’s way past time we had a grown-up, informed conversation about freedom of movement

I’ve made the case for migration being an intrinsic part of what it is to be human. That does not, of course, necessarily make it a good thing. Human instinct is not the most reliable moral compass. And since purportedly liberal voices have recently joined the far-right tub-thumpers in talking about “tighter controls”, and even the Guardian has to use “actually” in the headline of a positive story about immigration, there are clearly issues yet to be settled here.

So here’s a cost-benefit analysis: a comparison of the (alleged) benefits and drawbacks of human resettlement.

The downsides

Prior to 1066, most arrivals in the British Isles were invaders or raiders rather than true migrants. The relative calm that followed the Norman Conquest paved the way for the first peaceful settlers – and the slurs the natives have lobbed at them have barely evolved in a millennium.

‘They’re stealing our jobs’

Twaddle on every level.

It was never “your” job to begin with. It was a job advertised in the country where you happened to be born. It was the employer’s job, to give to whomsoever she chose.
The migrant is in no sense “stealing” the job; she is merely competing fairly for it. If you’re finishing second best to someone whose first language isn’t English, you might want to think about a different line of work.
The majority of immigrants take jobs that Britons simply don’t want to do, such as cleaning, fruit picking and social care. Many more take roles that Britons cannot do: the UK has huge skills shortages in a number of sectors, notably engineering, IT and healthcare.

(Incidentally, the racists who trot out this line can rarely back it up with evidence. When they do, it’s anecdotal: “It happened to me” or “It happened to my mate”. Sorry to break it to you, Socrates, but the value of anecdotal evidence is precisely diddly-squat. All the large-scale data says otherwise.)

Besides, the number of jobs available is not fixed (this common misapprehension is known as the lump of labour fallacy). Immigrants earn and pay taxes, pay rent, buy food and clothes and phones and all the other things natives do. This indirectly creates more jobs. Furthermore, many of them start up their own businesses (indeed, immigrants are twice as likely as locals to do so), thus directly creating more jobs. If there were a fixed number of vacancies in an economy, then unemployment after years of mass immigration should be stratospheric. It’s not. The latest figure is 4.1%, or 1.38 million people – among the lowest of all time.

It’s true that living in an economic union of 550 million citizens means there’s 10 times as much competition as when the UK’s borders were closed. But it also means there are 10 times as many job opportunities. That’s the whole point of an expanded labour market: more choice for employers, more for employees.

‘They’re driving down wages’

Not according to 99% of all research into this issue, they’re not. Some studies have found marginal evidence of a slight depression in pay for the very lowest-paid, but the picture is far from clear-cut, not least because it’s impossible to know what would have happened to wages in the absence of freedom of movement.

At worst, according to the Migration Advisory Council’s calculations, a 10% increase in the number of non-natives entering the services industry may have resulted in a 1.9% decrease in wages for those employed in it – most of whom, traditionally, were migrants already.

Besides, any short-term losses are more than made up for in the long term by overall growth in the economy due to immigration, which benefits everyone.

‘They’re all scroungers’

This argument, in conjunction with the above, conjures the image of Schrödinger’s immigrant: a shadowy figure simultaneously stealing people’s jobs and lazing in front of Jeremy Kyle while wallowing in the opulence conferred by the UK welfare system.

It’s also bollocks. Government figures show that foreign nationals are far less likely to claim benefits than people born in the UK; while they make up 17.6% of the working population, they account for less than 7.4% of benefits awarded.

This is largely because the law grants foreign-born citizens less access to the welfare system in the first place. Under our arrangement with the EU, no EU citizen can claim benefits for the first three months of their stay, and they can be deported if they have not found work after three further months on benefits (or cannot otherwise support themselves).

Besides, it makes no sense. Who in their right mind would give up their friends, family and culture, uproot everything and go to all the trouble of building an entire new life in a country with unfamiliar food, customs and language, with the sole aim of pocketing the princely sum of £73 a week?

‘They’re all criminals’

Jewish usurers, Gypsy thieves, Italian mobsters, Irish thugs, Asian grooming gangs: virtually every wave of foreigners to set foot on these shores has endured systematic accusations of wrongdoing. While every cart has its bad apples, it simply isn’t true that immigrants are more likely to break the law than natives.

There are just under 10,000 foreign offenders in British jails and NOMS-operated IRCs, a fraction under 12% of the prison population, and they make up 9% of the population overall. “Whoa!” you cry. “That’s above the national average! Immigrants are more criminal than the average Brit!”

Unfortunately for your argument, Mr Racist, IRCs are … immigration removal centres, which hold people awaiting deportation, almost exclusively for immigration violations. They generally hold around 3,000 people. So the number of foreigners detained in English and Welsh prisons, for actual crimes, is only 8% of the total. Or below the national average.

In some cases, it appears that immigration actually lowers crime. One research paper, for example, found that the incarceration rate among foreign-born US citizens was a quarter of the rate for those born there.

Criminals, like benefit scroungers, are lazy. It’s their defining quality. The reason they commit crimes and sign on, rather than getting a job, is that they want maximum return for minimum effort. But (as any British plumber allegedly put out of work by a Polish counterpart will tell you) most migrants work hard.

It stands to reason. Is someone who has the get-up-and-go, organisational skills and commitment to do the necessary research, learn a new language, fill out all the paperwork, leave behind home, career and family, travel hundreds of miles, set up a bank account, etc, really going to turn into a slob on arrival? Is a rapist-in-waiting really going to go to all that trouble merely because he fancies raping British women?

Blackguards and wastrels are more likely to ply their “trades” nearer home, where they have established criminal networks and understand the local markets and loopholes, than to trudge halfway across the world to an alien land with a firmer rule of law.

It’s worth mentioning – because most Leave voters sure don’t seem to know – that under EU law, the UK already has the power to deport criminals of EU origin. It can also prevent known offenders from entering. In the year ending June 2017, 5,301 EU citizens were deported from the UK, and in the period 2010-2016, the Border Force refused entry to 6,000 EU nationals.

“But look,” say the racists, linking to a single story about an EU immigrant who committed a crime, or a handful of bad guys. Again, they’re generalising from isolated incidents to a broader pattern that the figures just don’t support.

“I don’t care if only 0.25% of foreigners commit crimes,” bleat other racists. “Ten thousand is too many! Get rid of them all!” That’s like banning all cars because 0.6% of them are involved in serious accidents every year, or banning all doctors because 0.4% of them have criminal convictions. Madness.

When racists attempt to support their claims with evidence, they invariably cite the Quilliam report, just about the only vaguely authoritative investigation into so-called grooming gangs conducted to date in the UK. Close analysis, however, reveals it to be no such thing; its assumptions, methodology and conclusions have all been rubbished by other commentators.

As a footnote, I would remind you that Britain’s departure from the EU threatens its participation in the European Arrest Warrant, under which almost 7,000 criminals were removed from 2009-2016.

‘They’re putting pressure on housing and social services’

There is some logic behind this one. Unlike the labour market, a country’s resources and services are, at any given point, finite. If more people arrive, there will be fewer houses, school places and GP appointments to go around.

However, governments always have the option to build more houses and schools, just as they have done to accommodate population growth throughout history. And as it turns out, immigrants disproportionately take jobs in education and healthcare, and, being younger and healthier, use these services less. As the UK is now discovering, if you create a hostile environment for foreigners, the teachers, lecturers, doctors, nurses and carers will be among the first to leave, and services will come under yet more strain.

“Why can’t we just train our own?” whine the racists. We can; but in the first place, it’s expensive – it costs £70,000 to train a nurse from scratch, £479,000 for a general practitioner, and £725,000 for a consultant. Second, it takes time: four years for a nurse, nine for a doctor. And third, you can’t expect exactly the right number of British students to step into a particular role simply because The Country Needs It. Supply does not always meet demand (which is another argument for a common market; it creates a larger playing field over which such imbalances can be corrected).

By the by, the notion that “Britain is full” is risible. The population density of the UK is 272/km2. By comparison, Monaco has 19,009 people per square kilometre, or 70 times the concentration. The UK population would have to reach 4.5 billion before it was as full as Monaco.

‘They’re destroying our culture’

A couple of hundred years ago, English culture was cockfighting, bear-baiting, maypoles and Morris dancing. Few got out their hankies when they faded away to be replaced with football, pubs and Celebrity fucking Big Brother.

In any case, the speed of change in the UK is constantly being exaggerated by the media. The endless stories in the Daily Mail and Express about people forced to say “Happy holiday” instead of “Christmas”, the word “Easter” being omitted from chocolate eggs and pork products being dropped from restaurant menus are usually anecdotal if true at all: scaremongering designed to sell more papers. Oh, and there are no sharia courts. There are a few dozen sharia councils that consult on matters of marriage and divorce.

To those racists who insist that the British way of life is under threat, I say this: Welsh, Scottish and Irish cultures are all still pretty damned vibrant. If they can survive centuries of English dominion, why can’t English culture survive the arrival of a few million guests?

Culture is fluid. Like language, it’s a living, breathing thing. Any culture that stops changing withers and dies. And how do cultures change? By evolution, certainly, but mostly, like language, by borrowing from others. To illustrate this point, I’ve compiled a short list of aspects of “British” culture that aren’t actually British at all:

Fish and chips (Portugal, Belgium), roast dinners (France), full English breakfast (Germans popularised sausages and bacon, while baked beans come from South America via the US and their sauce is made from Mediterranean tomatoes), barbecues (Caribbean), beer made from hops (Netherlands), golf (ancient Rome or China, via pre-Union Scotland), April Fool’s Day (France, or the Netherlands; certainly not England), Christmas and all things Christian (Middle East), Christmas trees (Germany), Easter eggs (Africa via Iraq), New Year’s celebrations (Iraq), pantomime (Italy), curry (India/Sri Lanka), pizza (Italy) and St George (Turkey).

‘They don’t integrate’

Admittedly, some do so more successfully than others. Just two points here: 1) integration is a two-way street. If you demonise and/or intimidate immigrants and refuse to employ them or socialise with them, you can hardly blame them for sticking with their own kind. 2) I can state categorically that every one of my friends from the EU – the ones who are still here, as well as the ones driven away by Brexit – speak and write English to a far higher standard than the average Brexiter on social media.

‘Allowing free movement within the EU discriminates against non-EU citizens’

This laughable bad-faith argument is about migration from specific countries rather than migration in general, but I’m mentioning it here because it seems to have gained a lot of traction of late.

You can see its appeal. It allows Brexit diehards to paint Remainers as the bad, racist guys and by extension themselves as the angels. But the notion that, because certain people enjoy certain advantages and others do not, you must create a level playing field by removing them from everyone – “’S not fair!” – is absurd.

By this reasoning, Fitness First is discriminating against non-members by only allowing in paying members. Alice is discriminating against Jenny (and everyone else on the planet) by dating Brian, so she must remain single for ever. And you are discriminating against all other fruits by eating an apple, and so must starve.

It’s impossible to strike deals with everyone at once. This is just a cynical contortion of language in an attempt to mislead, one that smells very strongly of 55 Tufton Street.

‘They’re all riddled with disease’

What utter bastards! When they’re not stealing your job or raping your children, they’re infecting you with typhus and AIDS!

Accusations of uncleanliness have dogged migrants for centuries – the Irish and the Gypsies came in for a particularly hard time – and while this line hasn’t seen so much play in the Brexit debate, the fake news merchants at Fox News and the like are frantically pursuing the health emergency angle in their rush to demonise the central American migrant caravan.

The claim is, to put it politely, a bunch of arse.

‘They’re replacing the native population’

The more hysterical nationalists are convinced that if immigration persists at its present levels, white British people will soon be in a minority, or eliminated altogether.

This is the slippery slope fallacy in action: the assumption that a trend will continue unchanged. But trends never do. Rates of migration rise and fall. The UK has recently experienced a peak in new arrivals, as a result of the accession of the eastern European states. As those states’ prosperity approaches that of the UK, the number of people moving here will decline.

Other racists point to the fact that immigrants “outbreed” the native population – new arrivals tend to have larger families. This is quite true. However, it is also true that natality among subsequent generations tends to subside to local levels (pdf).

The upsides

They fill skills shortages

No one’s seriously going to dispute this, are they? I’ve already mentioned the high levels of foreign-born staff in the NHS and the education system, but they also make up a disproportionate chunk of the workforce in catering, construction, fruit-picking, food preparation and technology. Food is already rotting in fields and patients dying alone in hospitals since the number of immigrants began to fall after the Brexit vote.

They’re great for business

Immigrants bring energy, dynamism and ideas. Immigrants are responsible for one in every seven new startups in the UK, and their ventures create 14% of all British jobs. Here’s a far from complete list of great “British” brands that were in fact founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants: Dollond & Aitchison, M&S, Tesco, Rothschild & Co, ICI, General Electric, Burton, Selfridge’s, Barings Bank, Barnardo’s, Mme Tussauds, GlaxoSmithKline, British Petroleum, Reuters, Schroders Asset Management, Moss Bros, Triumph, Lion’s soaps, Shell, Easyjet, Cobra Beer, Acorn Computers (ARM), WPP, Cafe Nero, DueDil, RationalFX, Deliveroo, Transferwise, Kano, Carwow and Hassle.

They enhance our culture

New food, new music, new fashions, new words. You can draw up your own fucking list this time.

They boost the economy

If you can find me a single authoritative, peer-reviewed study that shows that immigrants to the UK have a net negative effect on the economy, I’ll shag Katie Hopkins.

Immigrants put more in than they take out; natives’ net contribution is negative

Cultural homogeneity has a positive impact on GDP growth

Influxes of asylum seekers increase per-capita GDP, reduce unemployment and boost tax revenues

Migration has no negative impact on employment outcomes; increases productivity

But you don’t have to trawl through academic papers for proof that freedom of movement is an economic boon. You just have to draw up a list of the richest cities and countries in the world and then look at their respective levels of migration.

They compensate for falling birthrates

Indigenous Brits are not reproducing at a sufficiently high rate to replace the existing population. British-born women have an average of only 1.7 children each, and a further 200,000 Brits leave these shores every year. Without immigration to make up the shortfall, the British population would decline by 417,000 every year.

And a shrinking population, as China is discovering, is catastrophic for the economy, because there are fewer people to pay tax and thus fund healthcare and pensions for the older generation.

They enhance our personal lives

As well as giving us access to a wider employment market, migration – inward and outward – vastly increases the choice of friends, business partners and lovers available to us. As this is hard to quantify, there’s little in the way of hard research on the subject, but I know I am not alone in having made dozens of wonderful, life-changing connections that would never have come to pass without freedom of movement.

They make war less likely

Last and foremost, freedom of movement between the nations of Europe has – exactly as it was intended to – increased mutual reliance, cooperation and understanding between peoples, tempered nationalist tendencies, and led to the longest spell of uninterrupted peace in the continent’s history. I’m in no hurry to throw that away.

So that means …

“Tottenham has turned French” – Unnamed Londoner, early 16th C
“A certain preacher … abused the strangers in the town, and their manners and customs, alleging that they not only deprived the English of their industry, and of the profits arising therefrom, but dishonoured their dwellings by taking their wives and daughters” – Sebastian Giustinian, ambassador to Venice, 1517
“A congregation … of distressed exiles growne so great and yet daily multiplying, that the place in short time is likely to prove a hive too little to contain such a swarme” – W Somner, 1639
“The nation it is almost quit undone//By French men that doe it daily overrun” – Anonymous, 1691
“Why should we take the bread out of the mouths of our own children and give it to strangers?” – John Adams, US president, 1800
“The Jews of the lower orders … have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1830
“Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are – some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?” – Donald Trump, 2015

I feel ashamed to be a human being when I’m reminded of how little we have learned through the ages.

When debating Brexit with Leave voters on Twitter, I used to concede the point that “having concerns about mass immigration is not racist”. I take it all back. It’s racist as fuck.

The reason I’ve liberally peppered this post with the word “racist” is that, after looking at material from hundreds of sources and weighing the matter long and hard, I’ve concluded that there is no argument against immigration. The benefits are enormous, the costs negligible. The only possible reason left that anyone could have for objecting to immigration is xenophobia, English exceptionalism, Fear of the Other: in a word, racism.

Immigrants are people. Just like us. In fact, usually, better than us; more industrious, less likely to commit crimes, younger, healthier, brighter. If you deny or dismiss the fact that migration is a fundamental part of human nature; if you wave away the proven benefits; if you insist on stressing the downsides to the exclusion of all else, even though there is scant (if endlessly repeated) evidence to back up your point; then you, my foe, are a racist.

Most people who have actually encountered large numbers of immigrants are not afraid of them; they know from experience that the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. The only reason people think migration is a bad thing is that power-hungry populists, rightwing media and, increasingly, trolls in the employ of enemy powers tell them that it is.

Historically, there have been some problems, but it’s invariably the migrants who bear the brunt. Locals might have been mildly inconvenienced by the unsanitary conditions in an Irish ghetto, or the din generated by Italian ragamuffins playing barrel organs on the streets of 19th-century London; meanwhile, the migrants themselves were starving, dying from cholera, being shunned and deported and lynched.

Robert Winder put it so eloquently in his book on migration, Bloody Foreigners, that I’m shamelessly going to quote him in full:

“Illegal immigration is a fine-toothed comb. The system catches the clumsy or the clueless; only the best, the bravest and the luckiest slip through. It should never surprise us when migrants prosper; nearly all of them have passed an exacting extrance exam.”

All this fearmongering about immigrants and minorities has no basis in reality; it is the tool of dangerous demagogues. It is they, and not the targets of their false fury, that we should be deporting.

Yes, I love the EU. Thanks to Brexiters

The referendum result drove me to go back and examine why Remain lost. In the process, I became a more committed Europhile than ever

Display of EU merchandise in Parliamentarium, Brussels — The EU parliament shop. Yes, I did buy something. See if you can guess what.

To add to their grubby little crib sheet of mindless, soulless slogans – “You lost, get over it,” “They need us more than we need them,” “You hate democracy”, “Stop talking our country down”, “Triggered!” – the Brexiters have a new refrain: “You love the EU.” Common variants include “EU-loving leftard”, “EU stooge”, “Why don’t you fuck off to Europe if you love it so much?” and “How much is Soros paying you?” (Answer: not enough to make up for the rise in the price of my weekly shop because of Brexit.)

This is clearly intended to be an insult, disturbingly close in spirit to the “n****r-lover” of old, insofar as it implies that any fondness for the target is self-evidently evil or stupid.

The grand irony here is that before the referendum, I didn’t have any special affection for the EU (just as, four years earlier, animosity towards it was vanishingly rare – pdf). I was aware of its existence, of course: I’d heard about all the red tape and a few allegations of corruption (mostly from Ukip MEPs), and about how the accounts were never signed off, but I also knew that a lot of people had benefited from freedom of movement and research collaboration and was dimly aware that free trade generally creates jobs and keeps prices low.

I did a bit more research in the weeks before the vote, enough to satisfy myself that my instincts were broadly correct, and noted that while some proponents of Remain (Cameron, May, Osborne) were hardly the most trustworthy individuals, the Leave campaigners were, to a man (and Kate Hoey), corrupt, self-serving slimeballs churning out nothing but fearmongering tripe. As a result, when June 23rd 2016 rolled around, I voted Remain.

Then Leave won, and it was only then that I, and millions of others, began to realise exactly how much we had lost.

For the last two years, I’ve done little but debate with Leave voters online and devour articles and books on EU law and European history (I can particularly recommend Guilty Men: Brexit Edition by Cato the Younger). I interviewed EU citizens who were leaving the UK because of Brexit. I’ve now written 30 blog posts on the subject (one of which has racked up more than 600,000 hits and another of which was published in the New European, yay). I joined Best for Britain and began donating to all manner of Remain-related causes. I travelled to Brussels and visited the Parliamentarium and the Museum of European History.

And the more I found out, the deeper my attachment to the European project became. The Parliamentarium’s unpretentious explanation of the origins of the EU, as well as being fascinating, offered a sobering reminder of the dire circumstances that were the impetus for its foundation. The Museum of European History, with its tableaux representing decades of everyday life across 28 countries, lifted the soul.

I discovered that all those stories of red tape, corruption and unvetted accounts were a bunch of horseshit. At the same time, I found out that EU membership conferred vastly more benefits than I had imagined: consumer protections, basic labour rights, Horizon 2020, Erasmus, Erasmus +, free mobile roaming, Euratom, EMA, Galileo. And I watched with horror as the vote to leave not only unleashed a sickening wave of xenophobia in my once tolerant country, but led some of the vilest scumbags in existence to believe that they could get away with lies, abuse and psychological manipulation on an industrial scale.

So now I can say, proudly and with my hand on my heart: yes, I do love the European Union. And each one of your jibes and boasts and threats, Brexit fantasists, will redouble my determination to fight for the UK’s continued membership – or failing that, to retain the closest relationship possible.

Get over it? When hell freezes over.

A dictionary of Brexitese

A beginner’s guide to the UK’s newest language – a fascinating creole of English and bullshit

Until recently, there were 11 native languages in the United Kingdom: English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Cornish, Angloromani, Scottish Gaelic, Shelta, British Sign Language, Irish Sign Language and Northern Ireland Sign Language. But some time in early 2016, a 12th tongue sprang forth.

Brexitese, at present attested for the most part only in written form, is superficially similar to standard English. Its grammar is identical (if simplified), and it draws on the same word pool. However, the Brexitese rules of punctuation are looser, and it has a far smaller vocabulary, to the extent that its users often have to support their text with cry emojis. Words of more than two syllables are generally shunned altogether.

The most striking feature, and the most problematic for learners of the fledgling tongue, is that the meanings of many Brexitese words differ slightly – sometimes markedly – from their standard English equivalents.

Here, then, for the benefit of those who wish to properly comprehend our isolationist brethren, I shall be compiling a brief guide to the most common of these linguistic “false friends”.

Democracy

English meaning: System of government under which a governing body, elected by the people as their representatives and advised and assisted by a civil service with the relevant expertise, takes decisions regarding the laws of the land. In a properly functioning democracy, these representatives are selected through free and fair elections, the citizens should participate actively in politics and civic life, the human rights of citizens should be protected, and the rule of law should apply equally to all citizens. Also known as parliamentary democracy.

Brexitese meaning: System of government, long since abandoned by most civilised societies, under which the people themselves take decisions on matters about which they do not have the first fucking clue. Votes need neither be free nor fair, and the human rights of millions of those affected by those votes can be trampled on whenever the winners see fit. Aka ochlocracy.

Examples: “You hate democracy”; “Stop trying to overturn democracy”.

Politically correct

English meaning: Taking care not to offend or further marginalise already marginalised groups, such as ethnic subgroups, disabled people, LGBT groups, women, and the adherents of certain religions; making an effort to accommodate the needs of minorities; showing consideration.

Brexitese meaning: Actively destroying the fabric of society.

Shackle

English meaning: A pair of fetters connected by a chain used to bind a captive’s legs together.

Brexitese meaning: Commitments voluntarily entered into by treaty; bonds of friendship.

Red tape

English meaning: Excessive bureaucracy or adherence to official rules and formalities.

Brexitese meaning: Laws guaranteeing workers’ rights, basic safety standards and environmental safeguards.

Example: “Our businesses will only thrive when they are free of EU red tape!”

Dictatorship

English meaning: Form of government under which one person, or one small group of people, retains absolute power over a nation, with no or few constitutional limitations. Generally characterised by corruption, the extensive use of propaganda, the suppression of basic civil liberties, and the imprisonment, exile or violent removal of dissenters.

Brexitese meaning: Voluntary partnership with a prosperous trading bloc, which also happens to handle some of the smaller, administrative apparatuses of state. Constitutional limitations all over the shop, none of which can be altered without the consent of all member states. Characterised by tolerance, mutual understanding, compromise, and a commitment to upholding civil liberties.

Example: “We’ve had enough of this EU dictatorship!”

Expert

English meaning: A person who is highly knowledgeable about, or very skilful in, a particular area.

Brexitese meaning: A complete idiot who, despite having trained extensively in his or her chosen discipline, makes assessments and predictions that are wrong 100% of the time.

Example: “We’ve had enough of experts!”

Socialism

English meaning: Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Brexitese meaning: Any system of government – but particularly violently oppressive ones – that happen to have used the word “socialism” in their name, however disingenuously.

Example: “The Nazis weren’t rightwing, they were socialists!”

Mandate

English meaning: The authority, granted by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins a vote, to carry out a policy explicitly spelled out before that vote.

Brexitese meaning: The authority to do anything the winners of an election want, regardless of what was voted on.

Example: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” 52%: “Leave the European Union.” Brexiters: “Great, this means we have a mandate to leave the EEA, EFTA, the single market, the customs union, Euratom, Horizon 2020, Erasmus, and the jurisdiction of the ECJ.”

Sovereignty

English meaning: The authority of a state to govern itself or another state; freedom from external influence.

Brexitese meaning: Precise definition unclear – no Brexit speaker has ever been able to give an example of how leaving the EU will increase Britain’s sovereignty – but saying it seems to make them feel a lot better. An interjection, perhaps?

Great

English meaning: 1. Of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above average. 2. Impressive or grand.

Brexitese meaning: The way things used to be, or, at least, how I remember them being, when I was young and carefree and people still wanted to have sex with me.

Example: “Make Britain great again!”

Freedom of speech

English meaning: The legal right to broadcast one’s views or feelings freely. (Very few societies permit total freedom of speech – not even the US, which has restrictions on the expression of obscenity, child pornography, defamation, incitement to violence and true threats of violence.)

Brexitese meaning: My right to broadcast my feelings. Especially the offensive ones. You lost, so you have to shut up, for ever.

Will of the people

English meaning: The overwhelming consensus of opinion among the body of a population.

Brexitese meaning: The unspecified ramifications of one poorly informed decision, made one day more than 18 months ago, by 27% of the population, many of whom only did so as a protest vote. In English, we would render this “The whim of a quarter of the people.”

Enemy of the people

English meaning: One who acts against the interests of his nation and/or his countrymen, typically by violent means.

Brexitese meaning: Anyone who expresses even the tiniest doubt about the wisdom of dragging a country out of the world’s richest trading bloc for no good reason. Examples include judges, young people, liberals, scientists, economists, actors, philosophers, “metropolitan elites”, and 16.1 million Remain voters.

Traitor

English meaning: A person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause, or principle.

Brexitese meaning: Anyone who has the temerity to use facts, reason and evidence in an argument, instead of blind emotion.

Unelected

English meaning: In office not as a result of a popular vote, but by another means, such as interview, test, examination, or competition.

Brexitese meaning: Wrong.

Lie

English meaning: A false statement made by someone who knows it to be false; a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Brexitese meaning: A prediction made in good faith in order to dissuade someone from pursuing a dangerous course of action.

Example: “But Remain lied too! Instant recession, austerity budget, world war three …”

Cockroach

English meaning: Any of about 4,600 species of primitive living winged insects, resembling broad, flattened beetles, generally nocturnal and considered domestic pests.

Brexitese meaning: A human being fleeing its home country because its life is in danger, because of war, famine or persecution.

Independent

English meaning: Not requiring or relying on others (for care or livelihood).

Brexitese meaning: Having no treaties or agreements with other nations; isolated and vulnerable.

Triggered

English meaning: Brought about, caused.

Brexitese meaning: Reduced to tears or powerless rage; extremely distressed. Used as a spurious claim of victory by teenagers and man-babies on the internet whenever an intentionally offensive message elicits any sort of response.

Example:

Bregrets, I’ve found a few

It takes courage to admit you were wrong. As Leave’s lies unravel, more and more Brexit voters – 310 and counting – are showing it

On 23rd June 2016, 17,410,742 people voted for the UK to end its 43-year membership of the European Union. They did so after a Leave campaign chock full of lies, distortions and scare tactics, many of which have been exposed as such in the days since the referendum.

Many stand by their vote. It’s hard to admit you made a mistake. But as it becomes clearer that both the alleged sins of the EU and the advantages of membership were grievously misrepresented, that no one fully explained the extent to which Britain’s economy is integrated with and dependent on the 27 other EU nations, and as more meat is added to the bones of stories about illegal cooperation between the Leave campaigns, suspicious donations to pro-Brexit groups and interference in the vote by malevolent foreign actors, more and more Brexiters are seeing the error of their ways. I’ll be keeping track of them here.

Bit harsh on yourself there, Leila – you’re far from alone. Many others have struggled with the idea that so many tabloid newspaper journalists and politicians could lie so brazenly, and so clearly contrary to the interests of the country, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this is what’s been happening.

Welcome aboard the good ship Remain, Peter’s friend.

Like a reformed smoker, Michael’s now quite the virulent anti-Brexit campaigner.

Good on you, Hugh.

Tim only went and wrote a bloody blog post about it.

The Brexit headbangers would have us believe that support for Remain is waning. That really doesn’t seem to be the picture these tweets are painting.

There’s no need to be afraid of mockery from Remain voters if you’re thinking of admitting your Leave vote might have been a mistake. We all voted on the basis of very poor-quality information.

Don’t kick yourself too hard, Tre. There are plenty of billionaire disaster capitalists queueing up to do that for you.

I agree. I voted out, but have definitely changed my mind. The logistics are just too difficult. https://t.co/3106fEDTr7

— Gordon McKay (@gmckay_51) August 28, 2017

Not exactly a full-throated recantation from Gordon, but it’s another vote in the bag. (Tweet has since vanished – I think Gordon runs one of those apps that automatically deletes all tweets more than a month old. The reply below, however, survives. Because of eventualities like this, I’m going through this post replacing all embedded tweets with screenshots.)

Aaand two more recruits, courtesy of Kristian.

It was almost certainly in your top three, Beth, but I won’t press the point.

This one came courtesy of @StuartBudd1 on Twitter.

Another Bregretter wedded to the old ways is MG:

This Leave voter is pretty upfront about her reasons for flip-flopping. And I imagine a fair few of these 4 million fellows might well vote differently in a second referendum – or at the very least abstain.

According to this study, the number of people who regretted voting Leave was already greater than the margin of victory for Leave – and that was in October 2016. As the scale of the task facing the UK government and its rank unfitness to undertake it become ever clearer, that number can only have risen.

There are doubtless hundreds, possibly thousands more Bregretters – it only took me an hour to collect the examples above. Feel free to send me any more admissions of error you may find (after thanking them for their courage and honesty, natch). The case for a second referendum – or, preferably, a simple retraction of article 50 – grows stronger by the day.

Bregretters found since 20/9/17

I may have made a rod for my own back here. Mind you, I’ll take a rod up the tradesman’s if it stops Brexit.

(A revealing little exchange, that one. Despite the wailing of Liam Fox and various shady corporate-sponsored thinktanks, there has been much speculation that the BBC has given far too much prominence to advocates of Brexit – and especially of hard Brexit.)

(That last post was retweeted by the @BrexityRegrets account, which had, as of 18/12/2017, winkled out 95 more people who have had second thoughts since 23/6/16.)

Inspired by a broadside of hatred and scorn from hardened leavers (and doubtless a few Mercer trolls) on 18 December, I decided to broaden my search and started finding more Bregretters in unexpected places like Mumsnet:

And here’s one from the Student Room:

Ooh, just found a Facebook group that should turn up a few more. Here’s one:

And another Facebook post:

Six more were interviewed here for the Huffington Post. Another wrote of her change of heart for the Telegraph. This caller to James O’Brien’s LBC radio show admitted he’d “made a mistake” and voted against the interest of his French partner of 15 years. This one made a similar admission, and O’Brien namechecks another (and implies many more) in this video. Another delicious radio moment came when caller David informed Nigel Farage that he would now vote Remain. Three more people seem to be admitting to a change of heart in this Channel 4 News clip. There are four more backtrackers in this separate Huffington Post article. This series of videos features 22 more. There’s one more reformed Remainer (not already covered elsewhere), Le Boy El Pablo, in this Time article. MSN spoke to another Bregretter here. For those who missed it, here’s a representative of an entire family who voted Leave and thought better of it the very next day – “when the facts started coming in”. Bill Walton facepalms about his vote in this article in the Sunderland Echo. Dorian Lynskey’s excellent piece on Leavers’ remorse provides us with a further six (one’s already included above). This Twitter thread found another eight flip-floppers not already covered above. And Lynda Smith uploaded this rather fitting video to YouTube to demonstrate how she now felt about her vote.

I’m reserving a special mention for this guy, who I found only because of the dedication of frothing Brexadi @JohnWebbWindsor on Twitter. Thanks, John!

This is proving to be quite an inexact science – there are possibilities of duplications, of course, and there’s no telling whether all the people concerned are telling the truth (although it’s hard to see why someone would make something like this up). Take this tweet thread, for example:

In the interests of fairness, I’ll only count this as one more Remainer. (PS: thanks for your bravery and honesty, Simon!) In any case, this is only supposed to give a general picture of the momentum building against a hasty and calamitous exit from the EU.

310 down. Only 598,690 to go.

Footnote, 12/02/18

Having hit the 300 mark, which I think is enough to make my point, and having realised that this page now takes a solid hour to scroll through, I’m going to be a little less rigorous with the updates, although I will continue to post links below every now and then.

Why I’ve changed my mind on Brexit

Support grows for second vote in Britain

Another Bregretter on Twitter

Exit, pursued by a bulldog

Theresa May says the “best and brightest” EU migrants will always be welcome in the UK. The fact is, thanks to her and the Mail’s rhetoric, they’re already leaving

Couple looking sadly at house — “Our heart is not in Britain any more.”

The first thing I hear when Mathieu and Pauline welcome me into their home is an insistent buzzing-and-slushing noise. Mathieu apologises profusely and hurries to turn off the offending washing machine. Pauline shows me through to the immaculate kitchen and offers me tea: “Would you like an Englishy one? Earl Grey?”

Both French and either side of 30, Mathieu and Pauline are two of the 3 million-plus EU citizens who chose to build a life for themselves in the UK. But that life is over. In light of the Brexit vote and the events that have followed, they’ve decided, with heavy hearts, to move on.

They’re not the only ones. Net migration to the UK fell by 84,000 in the year to May 2017, according to the Home Office’s latest figures, thanks in part to the departure of large numbers of eastern Europeans. Over 300 nurses left the NMC’s register in December 2016, almost twice the number who did so in June 2016, which, combined with an unprecedented 90% drop in the number of EU nurses registering to work here, threatens an imminent staffing crisis. Universities, too, are reporting an alarming fall in applications from EU students, which will put a huge dent in their finances. Coffee chains and farmers are already complaining of problems recruiting workers. A Facebook group called Plan B, set up by a German national in February specifically for EU citizens thinking of decamping, now has more than 1,200 members.

According to immigration law experts Migrate UK, the exodus is because of the political uncertainty surrounding EU citizens’ status, and further labour shortages should be expected. Managing director Jonathan Beech says: “Until the government ends uncertainty among EU citizens by guaranteeing rights to remain in the UK after Brexit, we are likely to see a continuation of these trends, and potentially the start of a Brexit ‘brain drain’ from the UK.”

Of the people I spoke to, none could remotely be described “spongers” or “low-value” workers. These are young, healthy, skilled, taxpaying contributors to society, who speak impeccable English and are well integrated into their local communities.

Mathieu and Pauline moved here in 2012, just in time for the Olympics, not so much drawn to the UK as repelled by the culture in France. “The system is so inflexible there. There’s a lot of nepotism, racism, a pervasive culture of sexism, and there are too many strikes,” says Pauline. “In the UK, no one gives a shit that Theresa May is a woman, or that David Lammy is an MP,” adds Mathieu. “You don’t get that in France.”

“So you came here because it was more tolerant and open?” Hollow laughter ensues.

Pauline works as a contractor for the NHS, Mathieu as a software engineer, which gives them a combined salary of £75,000; that’s £11,000 tax and £7,000 national insurance that the government won’t be collecting next year. And since Pauline has undergone one minor operation and Mathieu has visited his GP twice, you could hardly call them a burden on the state.

So where have they chosen for their new start? “Canada. It’s not just Trudeau – even if it had been Stephen Harper, we’d have thought about moving there,” says Pauline. “They love immigrants in Canada,” says Mathieu. “And as English-speaking French people, we are their dream immigrants,” Pauline concludes, her eyes twinkling briefly.

Only Mathieu currently has a job lined up in Quebec, but it turns out they’ll earn more from one income there than they do from two here – their money will go further, too. “House prices! Oh my God! Our friend just bought a five-bed house there for £220K!” “The water’s free, the electricity’s very cheap, food is super-cheap, electronics … Jackpot! We might just end up thanking Brexit.”

Which brings us to the $64m question. When did they decide to up sticks, and why? “It wasn’t actually Brexit,” says Mathieu. “I was expecting it, to be honest. People are pissed off, the system is broken, inequality is growing, people don’t want to be under rightwing Angela Merkel, the problems in Greece. It’s what the government did after Brexit.”

The tone until now has been overwhelmingly of sadness, disbelief. But suddenly a tinge of anger enters Pauline’s voice. “I’m disgusted by the attitude of the Tory government. They’re using us as leverage. It’s been 11 fucking months. All that time they could have said, ‘You’re welcome to stay,’ but they didn’t. They could have condemned hate crimes, but they didn’t. They could have told Amber Rudd to shut up. They could have told the Daily Mail to shut up.”

“The Daily Mail is hate speech,” Mathieu interjects. “‘Enemies of the people’? That’s Hitler, that’s literally Hitler! In France you would get prosecuted for that bullshit.”

It was the rapid poisoning of the atmosphere, they say, that made up their minds. “People tend to look on us with scorn and suspicion now,” says Pauline, “and I don’t think that’s acceptable, when you have given so much and made so much effort to integrate.

“My boss invited me into a meeting, and he said to me, ‘Brexit is good news. It’s not personal – it’s not against you – we’ve just to get rid of those Polish scroungers.”

Mathieu reserves special venom for Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: “‘We’re going to give money to the NHS. Oh no, you know what? We lied. We’re going to stay in the EEA. No, that was all lies, too.’ And the British people don’t care. I expected people to throw eggs at Number 10, to be honest. But nothing.”

Now it seems that lying is a habit the Tories can’t shake. “‘The NHS is not failing because of cuts, it’s because the immigrants came,’ they say. ‘The housing shortage is not because we’re not building enough, it’s because the immigrants came.’”

“We’re really concerned about the British people – it breaks my heart to see so many people going to food banks, to see disabled people getting their benefits cut to nothing,” says Pauline, unprompted.

The mood has turned sombre again. “We were invited here, they needed us,” says Mathieu, “and now suddenly they are telling us that everything is our fault.”

***

Daily Cunt "Enemies of the People" headline — … along with immigrants, liberals, the disabled, “luvvies”, academics, lawyers, gays, lesbians …

The decision to leave was rather more momentous for Melissa. For one thing, she’s been here longer, having arrived from Germany in 2009. For another, she’s older – in her late 30s. Last but not least, her partner is British.

Melissa came to the UK because she loved to travel, wanted to experience a different culture, and spoke excellent English. She first set up home in Norfolk, but a year later met Sean, an automotive engineer a couple of years her senior, and when a job opportunity arose for him in the Midlands, they moved there together. She works from home as a freelance translator, earning £30,000-£40,000 a year, most of it from German clients.

The main factor in their decision to go, she says, was the work situation; carmaking is one of the areas most likely to be adversely affected by Brexit. “If the economy goes too far south, Sean might lose his job. We feel like rats leaving a sinking ship.”

But money wasn’t the only consideration. “The language being used reminds me very much of what I learned in my history lessons in Germany,” says Melissa. “‘Traitor’, ‘enemy of the state’ – it’s very worrying.

“Because I work from home, I’m not exposed to much xenophobia, but I did get a few people giving me the Hitler salute.” It’s Sean who bears the brunt of the abuse, mostly from his staunch Brexiteer colleagues. “One of them once turned round to him and said: ‘You’re sleeping with one of them, so you’re just as bad.’”

The couple’s plans to move to Germany are now at an advanced stage. While Sean speaks no German, his skills mean he will have little trouble finding a decent job.

“The referendum result has been a massive, massive blow. Both Sean and I are heartbroken. We’ve lost some very good friends over this. It was not an easy choice, but we don’t see a future in the UK any more – the country he was born and I chose to make my home and was very happy in.”

Since Melissa does most of her work for German clients, the UK won’t particularly miss her talents, although Sean will be harder to replace. Mathieu and Pauline, too, foresee big problems for their employers. There are only two or three people in the country with Pauline’s particular expertise, and it would take 18 months to train a replacement. When Mathieu’s boss was headhunted by Apple over a year ago, he had to deputise – and he’s still deputising, because they haven’t been able to replace him. And that’s with easy access to all 28 EU nations. The prospects for the company are not bright; only a handful of the staff in his team are British – there’s little appetite for computer science degrees in this country – and several other EU nationals are considering a fresh start.

***

Lara is another one whose skills will be sorely missed; she’s a GP. According to an estimate made last summer, EU immigrants make up 10% of registered doctors and 4% of registered nurses, making the UK health service one of the world’s most dependent on foreign labour. And with the GP system already being described as “on the verge of collapse”, that’s a talent pool the UK can ill afford to lose access to.

Lara, in her early forties and of mixed French and Mediterranean heritage, will also be taking a British partner with her when she goes, and two children. Again, she says, it wasn’t the Brexit vote per se that forced their hand. “Initially, after the vote, I thought, ‘It’ll be all right, they’ll guarantee our rights,’ but they never did.”

She too lays much of the blame at the door of the immigrant-bashing tabloid press. “Basically, all these endless stories about EU citizens stealing jobs and being scroungers made me feel not at home. I was in shock. Surely this is not the country I’d spent the last 22 years in? It suddenly felt foreign to me.”

While she hasn’t personally received any abuse – her English is flawless, her dress and appearance unexotic – she has witnessed some unpleasantness. “One of our patients – ex-army, I think – started shouting at some of the other patients, Polish and Asians, in the waiting room. ‘Britain’s for white people, get out of my country …’ I don’t think anyone would have said any of these things before the referendum.”

So next year, instead of taking home £48,000 as a doctor in the UK, she’ll be earning a little less to treat French patients instead. It’s her friends and colleagues, she says, that she’ll miss most. “I have amazing work colleagues. Even though some of them voted leave because they felt the EU had an unfair advantage over Commonwealth people.”

***

Linda, too, will be taking a native Brit with her when she leaves. Aged 37 and originally from Turku in Finland, she arrived here in 2003. “I had basically loved Britain since I first came here aged 16 and spent a month in Devon on a language course. I travelled all around Europe Interrailing, but nowhere else felt so ‘homey’.”

She runs a small market research company with a British business partner, for which she claims a salary of £70,000. “We started the company five years ago, and have grown to a team of 10, mostly Brits.”

As with everyone I interviewed, Linda considered applying for permanent residency, but found the process too daunting. “I reluctantly considered applying for PR about four months after the referendum. Having looked at my 14 years in the UK, no five-year period was simple or straightforward enough to not worry that it wouldn’t pass the hostile approach of the Home Office. For example, I’ve studied twice while I’ve been here, although working part-time both times, and I’ve been ‘unemployed’ (while building the company and living off my savings).”

Crunch time for Linda and Ian was the Conservative party conference in October 2016, when Theresa May first signalled her willingness to lead the UK to a hard Brexit. “We’d toyed with the idea of leaving from the morning of the referendum, but I’ve spent almost my entire adult life here, and leaving at 37 didn’t really appeal. But it became apparent to us that under Theresa May, the environment would become hostile for EU citizens, and we realised there was really no future here for us if Britain left the single market.” Ian works in the tech industry, which, they fear, will fade to nothing in a UK cast adrift from the bloc.

The lack of support from the government, and the failure of the Lords’ amendment to article 50 on EU citizens’ rights, came as a further blow. “The uncertainty was taking an enormous emotional toll on me, especially as I was recovering from the burnout I got from the early years of building the business. The anxiety was pushing me back to depression and Ian felt it was important to get me out of the UK for my emotional well-being.”

Linda is in no doubt that Britain has become a less tolerant and hospitable place since the vote. “I would go as far as to say it’s hostile,” she says. “I came to the UK partly because I felt it was more open-minded and tolerant than the country I grew up in – needless to say, that illusion has now been totally shattered.”

Are there any circumstances under which they would cancel their plans, or consider coming back? A soft Brexit, maybe? “Nothing. I can never feel at home in England or Wales again. But if Scotland becomes independent, we will strongly consider moving there, as that was our original plan.”

So as soon as they can make the arrangements, they’re relocating to the Netherlands. They’re sad to be leaving their friends, but she also has more mundane concerns: “I will miss having Amazon Prime, and going to Boots!”

One of Pauline’s greatest fears is losing access to Marmite – “God, I love Marmite!” – but mostly, she says, they’ll miss the Brits. Well, some of them.

“In the UK you find the very worst of people,” chips in an impassioned Mathieu. “Uneducated, almost as bad as Americans. But you also have the best people – oh, my God, wonderful people – who are so logical, considerate, articulate … They know how to talk. They are perfect.”

The trouble, apparently, is that there just aren’t enough of them. “I still have emotional attachment to the people – but people are not a place,” says Pauline with a sigh. “Home is literally where the heart is, and our heart is not in Britain any more.”

The Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all promised, as part of their manifestos, to make the rights of EU citizens in the UK one of their top priorities after the election. Alas, it looks increasingly as though that might be a case of shutting the strong stable door after the horse has bolted.

• Names have been changed.

Tool Britannia

I believe the UK is great. If only it could stay that way

I’m getting a teensy bit ticked off with being told that I hate my country. “You think we can’t survive on our own,” Leave voters inform me whenever I dare to point out any potential pitfalls of the UK’s departure from the EU. “Stop talking the nation down, traitor!”

Because I don’t hate Britain in the slightest. I have lived and worked in the UK all my life and am proud of it all ends up. So to set the record straight, I’m going to roll out the union jack bunting and sing hallelujah for the nine industries in which my country leads the world.

Aerospace technology

The UK is the second biggest player in the world in aerospace engineering, excelling particularly in wing technology, one of the most specialised and lucrative areas. Last year, the UK aerospace sector grew by 6.5% to £31bn, 87% of which was exported. The industry employs 230,000 people in all, and unlike, say, banking, the whole country benefits, with large operations in Belfast, Broughton in Wales, Birmingham, Derby, and a huge cluster of activity in the south-west.

Financial services

Say what you like about bankers – I’ve had plenty to say about them in the past – but they do contribute a fair chunk to the economy. In 2016, financial and insurance services was worth £124.2bn in gross value added (GVA) to the UK, 7.2% of the total. The industry employs over a million people nationwide – 3.1% of all jobs in the UK – and the banking sector paid £24.4bn in tax to the exchequer in 2016. What’s more, the banking, insurance and pensions sectors are one of the few areas in which Britain is a huge net exporter. Exports of these services netted us over £60bn in 2016, vastly outweighing the £12bn imported.

Higher education

No fewer than 12 of the UK’s universities feature in the top 100 universities worldwide, from Oxford, widely admired for its excellence in the arts but also making huge strides in science, to Durham, with its world-renowned physics department and the pioneering Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World. There were 2.3 million students at the UK’s higher education institutions in 2015-16, providing 400,000 jobs and directly generating around £2bn for the economy each year – on top of the incalculable value of giving an outstanding education to a third of the populace.

Artificial intelligence

The UK owes its growing stature in AI largely to the existence of Google DeepMind, a company founded in London in 2010 and bought by Google in 2014. But a veritable explosion of innovative AI startups over the last few years, including language processing specialists VocalIQ, machine-learning keyboard SwiftKey, digital marketer Phrasee and neural network developers Magic Pony, has put the UK at the very vanguard of the field. Many recent developments – voice recognition software, predictive text and autonomous vehicles – have been driven by UK-based tech firms, leaving the UK uniquely poised to be a serious player in this young but booming sector. According to Accenture, artificial intelligence could add £654bn to the UK economy by 2035.

Electronics

Expertise at small-scale production and innovation are the two key drivers of the UK’s electronics success. While it can’t compete on an industrial scale with the likes of Japan and Korea, it can produce little marvels like the Raspberry Pi, which has now sold more than 12.5 million units. The UK electronics sector, the fifth largest in the world, has an annual turnover of £80bn a year and employs 800,000 people.

Life sciences

The life sciences – pharmaceuticals, biotech and medical research – are another area where the UK has taken giant strides in recent years, thanks again in large part to its thriving higher education system. We have a particular talent, it seems, for small molecules, therapeutic proteins and vaccines, and are among the chief voices on the Human Genome Project. By most metrics, the United States is the only country with a more cutting edge in matters medical; we’re ahead of the pack in neuroscience, parasitology and material science, and are the second most prolific producers of medical research papers – a jolly good show for the country with the 21st biggest population.

Life science projects in the UK contribute £56bn a year to the economy, support 482,000 jobs – which again are well distributed across the country – and attract more direct foreign investment than in any other European state.

Music

We may suck royally at Eurovision, but in the broader scheme of things, Britannia rules the airwaves. Domestic success often translates into success abroad, and we export £1.4bn worth of songs every year. Since the Beatles, we’ve seen acts from Pink Floyd to Adele, and Elton John to One Direction go global.

In 2015, British artists accounted for more than a quarter of all the albums purchased across Europe.

TV and film

Despite the best efforts of Channel 5 and the BBC’s comedy department, the UK still enjoys a reputation for top-notch television, and as a result, sales of UK-made programmes hit £1.3bn in 2015/16. TV, film, radio and photography (which the ONS unaccountably lumps together) provided 260,000 jobs in 2013 and produced a GVA of £10.8bn.

Sport

While UK Sport’s trophy cabinet may not exactly be heaving at the moment, for a nation of 64 million souls, we punch well above our weight. As well as the impressive medal hauls at the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics, we’re always there or thereabouts in world tournaments of football, rugby and cricket, and are disproportionately represented in tennis, snooker, boxing, cycling, hockey, canoeing, rowing, fencing, darts, squash, polo, sailing and golf. Even in off years, sport generates around £20bn for the economy.

(Australia, for what it’s worth, aren’t even the reigning champions of Australian rules football. Papua New Guinea are.)

The future (aka, the punchline)

So there you have it! Britain really is great! We may no longer be a fearsome military power or an industrial powerhouse, but we’ve carved out a new niche for ourselves, at the heart of a global economy! So much for Talky McDownerson!

Hang on a sec. Who’s this? Oh, hi, TM. I see you’ve compiled a summary of reports from the respective fields on the predicted effects of a hard Brexit.

(These are not the opinions of cloistered academics, faceless journalists, or “out of touch” economists. These are detailed, fully researched assessments by people either within, or intimately involved with, the trades concerned. These people have no intrinsic bias towards Europe, only first-hand experience of how their businesses interact with the European Union and to what extent they depend on it.)

The list of worries expressed by leading figures in the aerospace industry is as long as the non-EU passports queue at Gatwick. Long border delays for parts in the event of departure from the customs union. Concerns about access to the best talent from the EU. Rising costs if the UK is forced out of the European Aviation Safety Agency.

Other EU countries – Germany and Spain in particular – are already vying for contracts after Brexit in the hope that trading conditions no longer favour the UK.

“I’m scared witless” – Stephen Cheetham, chief executive, PK Engineering
“We are very worried about the impact of Brexit on the whole Airbus discussion” – aerospace supplier interviewed in Financial Times
“In terms of attractiveness … in terms of political stability, the UK goes down” – Andrew Mair, chief executive, Midlands Aerospace Alliance

I won’t spend too long on the impact of hard Brexit on financial services, as it’s one of the few areas the media have widely reported on. Suffice to say that the uncertainty caused by the vote alone has already wrought significant damage, with investments withheld and jobs and offices relocated to the mainland. The loss of passporting rights in the City of London is certain to prompt a mass exodus; rival financial centres from Dublin to Frankfurt to New York are salivating at the prospect of pillaging our capital of its coveted, lucrative institutions.

If David Davis walks away from the talks with the EU in September, as he seems intent on doing, he will be wiping out tens of thousands of jobs and setting a match to tens of billions in tax revenue.

In 2014-15, 20% of all students in UK higher education (437,000) were from abroad. While EU students are only liable for the same rates as UK citizens, those from outside the EU are charged more, so foreign students collectively pay £5bn a year in tuition fees –14% of universities’ total income. In addition, non-British students add around £26bn a year to the economy through their spending on and off campus, and indirectly support around 200,000 jobs.

But funnily enough, it seems not all foreigners are keen on being used as bargaining chips in negotiations or being attacked for speaking their own language in the street. Cambridge University has already seen a precipitous drop of 17% in applications from EU students, and Manchester University recently announced plans to axe 171 staff jobs, at least partly, according to the University and College Union, because of Brexit.

A falling pound, rising xenophobia, uncertainty over their futures and the faltering British economy are also driving away the best foreign tutors and lecturers.

The UK needs foreign nationals for its burgeoning AI industry more than most, suffering as it does from a critical shortage of digital skills. Far too few people are studying AI and other computer sciences to fill the positions locally, and almost 13 million British adults lack even the most basic IT skills. As a consequence, the IT sector recruits almost a third of its workers from elsewhere in the EU. For reasons discussed above, a hard Brexit is likely to drastically reduce the UK’s access to this talent pool. Reports of skills shortages are already emerging.

Since AI companies can set up almost anywhere, it’s primarily talent that attracts them, and if the UK loses its grip on the cream of Europe’s geeks, the business will go elsewhere.

As a footnote, a parliamentary report in October 2016 concluded that Brexit had thrown a crucial legal framework for AI and robotics, the General Data Protection Regulation, into doubt. It’s also jeopardised the free flow of data between the UK and the continent, crucial to the UK’s competitiveness.

Google DeepMind was founded by a British man born to Greek Cypriot and Singaporean parents, a Kiwi, and a Muslim Brit. Under the monocultural, send-’em-all-home regime proposed by nationalist Brexiters, it would never have seen the light of day.

A survey of the tech sector in early 2016 found that 84% felt it would be in the sector’s best interest if the UK stayed in the EU. Six per cent were undecided.

“A lot of organisations are now looking elsewhere to base their Innovation Labs for artificial intelligence” – Chris Rosebert, head of data science & AI, Networkers technology recruitment
“The funding that the research community has taken advantage of to hold its position internationally [in artificial intelligence and education research] has all come from the European Union” – Prof Rose Luckin, UCL Institute of Education

Insiders in the electronics industry have expressed fears about CE certification (European conformity). Tests to ensure that products meet agreed safety and quality standards are expensive, and if the UK adopts a different set of standards – in order, for example, to harmonise with America’s FCC – smaller British companies are unlikely to be able to afford to market their wares in Europe.

A more pressing problem is trade: if the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal, it will have to renegotiate free trade deals with other countries from scratch, a process that can take a decade or longer. In the interim, all British products would be subject to stiff tariffs (we’re not even guaranteed WTO status) and thus far more expensive than their competitors.

Fujitsu, Samsung and Hitachi (the second biggest private investor in the north-east after Nissan) are among the many electronics firms who have cautioned against a hard Brexit, warning that changes to the free movement of labour, customs operations and data passporting would mean job losses, a reduction in investment, and headquarters being relocated.

A report by thinktank Public Policy Projects, led by former health secretary Stephen Dorrell, warned that leaving the EU could have a damaging effect on the UK’s pharmaceutical and biotech industries. (It might also, by the by, adversely affect Britons’ access to the best drugs.)

Concerns include extra administrative burdens on clinical trials, additional checks and possible blocks on imports, patent protection, increased difficulty securing marketing authorisations, and a reduction in pharmacovigilance (oversight of safety standards, monitoring, risk management, transparency). The loss of the European Medicines Agency, and the 900 jobs and influence that go with it, will be a bitter blow regardless.

“The effects on the Life Sciences sector are likely to be substantial. This is because the UK would no longer keep access to many of the benefits of the EU system, such as the centralised procedure for marketing authorisations, the EU portal for clinical trials and the Pharmacovigilance database” – Toby Sears and Sally Shorthose, Bird & Bird Commercial Law

Visas for touring bands. Customs restrictions on merchandising. Increased production costs for vinyl. Copyright issues. Licensing. Higher tour expenses. Exclusion from the Digital Single Market. Cultural quotas. Dearer iTunes downloads. A hard Brexit would throw a sackful of spanners into the UK’s well-oiled music machine.

As a result, trade bodies AIM, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA), Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), Music Managers Forum (MMF) and Musicians Union all threw their weight behind Remain. In fact, one survey found that 91% of the music industry was in favour of the UK holding on to its membership.

“Those copyright rules have a huge impact on our business, and there is a very strong feeling among our members that the UK needs to be at the table to make sure that those rules are working in the interests of UK companies” – Geoff Taylor, chief executive, BPI
“Adopting an isolationist position is a huge mistake” – Colin Lester, CEO, JEM Artists management company
“The biggest impact would be not being able to influence EU regulation, particularly around intellectual property and the Digital Single Market” – Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general, CBI
“A victory for Brexit would be economically, politically, socially and culturally disastrous – for all of us” – Martin Mills, founder, Beggars Group, and David Joseph, CEO, Universal Music UK

A 2016 survey found that 63% of television executives believed the UK’s creative industries would fare better within the EU, outnumbering those who favoured Brexit by three to one. Another survey without a “don’t know” option came in 85/15. Their main worries were barriers to trade, economic damage limiting people’s purchasing power, and the loss of EU funding.

The film industry will also lose out on EU monies – British animation in particular looks likely to take a kicking – and will suffer further blows as more barriers are raised to British/European co-productions, and British-made content ceases to be classified as “European”, making it less appealing to countries that impose cultural quotas. Independent cinemas also look set to take a hit.

The picture is replicated across all the creative industries, from our hit plays, to our world-renowned dance troupes, to our novelists, our artists, our fashion designers. Many of these sectors, after a catastrophic drop in EU funding on top of the cuts imposed by recent Tory governments, face decline and possible collapse.

In addition to the measurable, practical difficulties above, there’s the less quantifiable but nonetheless important role of the UK’s “soft power”. Now that the UK is leaving the EU, English may soon cease to be an official language of the bloc – only Ireland and Malta speak it, and it’s not the only language in either nation – and now that it’s harder and less attractive for Europeans to come and work and study here, fewer people will bother learning English. Why would they, when there are easier options in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Poland? As fewer people understand English songs and TV shows, so fewer people will buy them.

“This decision has blown up our foundation. As of today, we no longer know how our relationships with co-producers, financiers and distributors will work, whether new taxes will be dropped on our activities in the rest of Europe, or how production financing is going to be raised” – Michael Ryan, chairman, Independent Film and Television Alliance
“Leaving the EU would be an utter disaster for the creative industries” – Ed Vaizey, culture minister

Brexit ‘likely to be devastating’ for UK film and TV industry

The main short-term effect of a hard Brexit on sport will be the changes to freedom of movement. Football players, for example, from South America as well as Europe, will find it much harder to gain a UK work permit if freedom of movement is lost. Cristiano Ronaldo, Thierry Henry and David Ginola might never have played in the Premiership if the UK had not been in the EU.

Similarly, the Kolpak agreement, under which sportsmen from Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) enjoy the same rights as EU players, will become void, meaning that the UK’s cricket, rugby and polo teams, among others, will be denied access to a valuable pool of players.

Olympic and Paralympic sports have already seen Brexit-related cuts to funding, and have been warned of more to come.

The international series of NFL games played every year in London may well cease, according to Maria Patsalos, a sports immigration lawyer at Mishcon de Reya LLP.

All 20 Premier League clubs were in favour of Remain.

“It is important that if we want the best league in the world, then we remain in the EU” – Jonathan Barnett, football agent

Torn union flag — “You finally really did it. You maniacs. God damn you all to hell.”

So where does this leave us?

Oo, looky there. That’s right. Literally every single one of the things that make modern Britain great depend partly – in some cases entirely – on our membership of the European Union; on close cooperation with partners, on minimal barriers to movement and trade, on the free and frictionless exchange of ideas, on attracting the cream of talent from 27 like-minded nations, on a reputation for tolerance, openness and fairness.

Sure, if Theresa May and co can somehow wangle us a good deal – keep the UK in the European Economic Area, giving us a status similar to that of Switzerland or Norway – then these jewels in the UK’s crown may survive largely unscathed. But no one bar a handful of spittle-flecked zealots believes we will get a good deal, because the EU will never retract its insistence on free movement as a condition of free trade. And since the Tory government has made it abundantly clear that they will take no deal over a bad deal, that means, in all likelihood, no deal. Adamantium Brexit. Armageddon for all the above.

I wouldn’t be so worried if Brexiters had offered a single suggestion as to what we can replace them with. We’ll never be competitive in steelmaking or textiles again – unless you’re willing to toil for 100 hours a week for less money than a sweatshop worker in Hyderabad. We don’t have much in the way of natural resources, our military strength is ranked below Italy’s, we’ve slipped to 20th place in the world education tables and are plummeting in the press freedom rankings. Cool Britannia is now a distant memory; since the referendum, the world now thinks we’re a bunch of arrogant, ignorant xenophobes. What will be the foundation of the New British Empire? Poverty tourism? Virtual-reality fox hunting? Jam?

You can’t turn back time

What the most ardent Brexiters fail to realise is that times have changed. Yeah, sure, Britain was once great, ruling the waves, duffing up Frogs and Krauts and all that. But then the empire collapsed, and other world economies, following our example and borrowing our technologies, started catching up. By the early 1970s, we were starting to struggle.

“Things were so much better before we joined the EU,” the Brexwits baa, apparently forgetting (cheers, nostalgia fallacy) that in 1973, many still lived 10 to a house and shared an outside toilet with next door. No one had a home computer, no one had a mobile phone, most people were lucky even to own one black and white television and a gramophone. Few could afford to go on holiday or eat out, child mortality was at 2%, and people were still dying of smallpox. Sure, so there was more of a sense of community and some people were still leaving their front doors open, but things were, on the whole, shit.

(It’s worth a reminder at this point that, even when Britain was truly great, things were by no means great for all Britons. The quality of life for all but the landed classes was miserable. Most people lived in abject poverty, public health was appalling, public sewerage was primitive where it existed at all, citizens were still subject to conscription, most people couldn’t vote, and the average person was doing well to live past 50. Success was only success for the few. Furthermore, most of the UK’s wealth was accrued at the expense of its colonies; it plundered their resources and enslaved or otherwise exploited their peoples. And those options, as far as I am aware, are no longer on the table in the 21st century.)

When it became clear that we were starting to lag behind our neighbours, we realised that a new strategy was required; so we swallowed our pride and joined the European Economic Community. And within that community, we adapted. We learned a new way of operating. And we did so so effectively that over the next four decades, our growth within the EU outstripped that of all other members.

The UK’s per-capita GDP increased by 2.1% in every year of our membership of the EU (compared with only 0.9% during the empire “boom” of 1872-1914). The key to our success was twofold: a language, culture and history shared with America and other English-speaking nations on the one hand, and geographical proximity to and membership of the European trade bloc on the other, made us the perfect bridge between the two. We might have ceded our pre-eminence in manufacturing, cotton mills and subjugating brown people, but in their place, after a period of painful adjustment, we built new temples. We ceased to be a powerhouse, and became instead a hub: a beacon of collaboration and commerce, a focal point for like-minded, progressive, creative thinkers.

I like to think of it this way. Prior to joining the EU, the UK was an independent organism: a lion, if you like, but one with mangy fur and rotting teeth. It made alliances where necessary, but it was basically self-sufficient, though its hunting prowess was fading fast.

When the UK joined the EU, it was forced to make compromises. It was no longer completely free, but this had its advantages; since it no longer had to take care of all functions, it could specialise in a few. Over the course of its 40 years of membership, the UK evolved from a discrete animal into something more like a vital organ within the larger beast that was the EU; a heart, say, or a lung.

Now, all of a sudden, ardent Leavers expect that lung to leap outside the host body and thrive by itself. (Like any animal deprived of a lung, the EU will suffer, but it will survive.) Some of them don’t even think we need a transition phase.

With their tireless, vainglorious, ill-informed insistence that the UK can succeed alone, a bunch of people who know as much about the way the modern world works as Kylie Jenner knows about thermodynamics have mortally endangered every single industry the UK worked so hard to lead the world in.

Congratulations, Brexitards. You killed your country.

I’ll never be a ‘re-leaver’

There has never in my lifetime been a more clear-cut case of light versus dark

Just a little post on why I am such a passionate Remainer.

I wasn’t actually all that pro-EU when all this referendum business started. I mean, I knew it was expensive, and could be more efficient, and sometimes seemed a little in thrall to the neoliberal economic model. But I also knew that it conferred huge benefits, in freedom of movement and trade and cooperation with our European neighbours. That was, frankly, enough to decide the matter for me.

But what made me so rabidly pro-Remain, so determined to stop this, was the breathtaking, unabashed wrongness of the Leave campaign. The sneering. The abuse. The lies. The threats. The casual, carefree use of logical fallacy. The racism. The ignorance. The creeping suspicion of foreign interference.

And as if that weren’t enough, look at the Leavers themselves. Gove. Johnson. Hannan. Farage. Banks. Duncan Smith. Rees-Mogg. Hoey. Even May, when she switched sides, went from steely, sensible woman to bitch from hell. Can you think of one person associated with the Leave campaign with a scintilla of compassion or wisdom?

For me, this is no longer about clinging on to the status quo, or protecting against personal loss (although Brexit has already been costly to me not just financially, but in terms of opportunities lost and friends forced to leave).

No, now this is just about making sure the bad guys don’t win. There has never been, in my lifetime, a more clear-cut case of light versus dark. And I’m not about to step into the darkness, or even the penumbra, in the interests of an easy life.

Fuck you, Farage, and Banks, and Cummings, and Putin. For as long as there is breath in my body, I shall fight your perfidious Brexit.

***

Footnote: the Tories, the Daily Mail and their cabal of piss-breathing liars would have us believe that half of all Remainers have suddenly changed their minds and thrown their weight behind Brexit. This just three weeks after another poll by the same firm showed that people who thought Brexit was a bad idea outnumbered those who supported it for the first time.

Of course, this claim, like pretty much everything else that comes from a far-right source these days, is bollocks. I was going to devote a post to explaining why, but handily, @HelenDeCruz, bless her cotton socks, has saved me the trouble. (TL:DR; the questions were poorly phrased and the headlines were misleading.)

We’re not going away any time soon.

Project Fear Watch

Will there come a point when people realise that the cost of Brexit is too high?

A rolling account of the damage done to the UK by the vote to leave the European Union. And remember: we haven’t left yet.

Race hate crimes/far right terrorism

No, they’re not “fake news”.

Brexit jeopardises fight against terrorism

Far-right activist’s shocking rant on Channel 4 News: ‘Take in a Syrian refugee, I hope you don’t get raped’

Vile solicitor launches racist tirade at mother and son on train

Man kicks Muslim woman in stomach, causing her to lose unborn twins

Race crimes on underground rise by 57% after Brexit vote

Hate crimes have risen by up to 100% since Brexit

Man kicked to death by gang ‘for speaking Polish’

Gang inflicts serious head injuries on teenage refugee in Croydon

The cowardly, brutal murder of Jo Cox MP

Other

UK’s millionaires believe Brexit will make them richer

End to free movement of animals could threaten endangered species

Warnings of customs chaos at ports in event of hard Brexit

Brexit will overburden already creaking civil service

EU working to push UK out of Euro space agency

Brexit will delay nuclear power stations

Senior civil servants considering stepping down over Brexit tensions

Gibraltar poses threat to post-Brexit aviation access

Ryanair will have to suspend flights in absence of Brexit deal

EU countries line up to host European Medicines Agency

Racing industry concerns over end of free movement for horses

Top orchestra quits Britain over Brexit migration clampdown

UK Sport warned of more Brexit funding cuts

Loss of access to EU talent will damage UK architecture industry

Brexit will damage fight against corruption, OECD warns

Parliament failing to scrutinise legislation properly because of Brexit overload

Denmark will claim centuries-old fishin rights in UK waters after Brexit

Replacing EU workers in hotels and restaurants could take 10 years

Employers struggling to fill vacancies

Top chefs refuse to move to London because of Brexit

Hard Brexit will mean up to 40% tariffs on UK agriculture exports, an end to free healthcare in the EU for UK citizens, loss of passporting rights for the City, and an end to the Free Skies agreement, Davis admits

Since I’m probably not going to be updating this as often as I should, for all the latest on the EU clusterfuck, check out Jon Henley’s excellent weekly Brexit briefing for the Guardian.

NB: The jolly impressive Brexit Shitstorm Forecast is a much more comprehensive resource on the same subject. I don’t want to steal their thunder. However, since it tries to be both compendious and balanced, there’s a lot to get through. My page will just consist of edited lowlights.

Bastards and fools: an open letter to my MP

Cartoon: everyone queueing up for wrong, easy answer

An open letter on Brexit to my MP, Keir Starmer QC

Keir Starmer QC MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA

February 10th 2017

Dear Keir,

Why did you become an MP?

Your previous job, as director of public prosecutions, was better remunerated, so it can’t have been for the money. You seem a humble and conscientious sort, so I doubt it was for the glory. Was it, then, because you wanted to make the world, or at least your country, a better place? I ask because I’ve been wondering whether your actions of late are fully consistent with that aim.

I’m not a religious man, but I’d like to quote you a passage from the Bible that offers an insight into the wisdom of crowds.

Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to releasing to the multitude one prisoner whom they wished. And at that time they had a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. Therefore, when they had gathered together, Pilate said to them, ‘Whom do you want me to release to you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?’ For he knew that they had handed Him over because of envy.

The governor said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release to you?’

They said, ‘Barabbas!’

Pilate said to them, ‘What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’

They all said to him, ‘Let Him be crucified!’ (Matthew 27:15)

The argumentum ad populum – the contention that something must be right simply because most people believe it to be so – has been recognised as a fallacy since Thucydides. The unspoken truth behind the representative democracy we have accepted as our political system is that ordinary people are not good at governing themselves.

Ordinary people do not have teams of advisers. Ordinary people do not have a civil service to carry out exhaustive research on the pros and cons of any proposed policy. We do not always have top-drawer educations, or the luxury of spare hours to meditate on problems. Few of us are able to see even the small picture clearly, never mind the big one. This is why we entrust MPs with the running of the country.

Never has there been a more exquisite demonstration of this point than the EU referendum. It’s clear beyond a shadow of doubt that hardly any Britons – on either side – bothered to acquaint themselves even fleetingly with the workings of the European Union, or the benefits and drawbacks of membership, prior to the vote. Those who did found themselves confronted with hysteria, hyperbole and rampant disinformation.

Even now, when I engage in online discussions with Leave voters, I find the majority still parroting the flagrant falsehoods published in the Sun, Mail and Express and on far-right conspiracy websites such as Breitbart and Infowars: lies about bendy bananas, lies about EU accounts never being signed off, lies about Turkey’s imminent accession and David Cameron’s World War Three (it was, as you know, a triumphant bit of straw-manning from Boris Johnson).

While I do not doubt that some people voted Leave in good faith and in full possession of the facts, some of the reasons I have seen and heard have ranged from the trivial to the downright absurd.

Even before the vote, it was clear that many of these motivations were incompatible. Opponents of free movement, for example, cannot possibly have their wish at the same time as those who want to create a flexible, deregulated “European Singapore”. We cannot both drastically reduce immigration and give more money to the NHS. Whatever shape Britain (or, as seems likely, its former component parts) is in when Brexit is over, a sizeable proportion of Leavers are going to be bitterly disappointed – on top of all the Remainers, and many of those who didn’t vote.

No one can say with certainty how deep and lasting the damage wrought by Brexit will be. (That fact alone should have been deterrent enough.) Most of the unaccountably maligned “experts” are pessimistic: between 3% and 9% off the country’s GDP, job losses in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, cooperative enterprises such as Erasmus and Cern wrecked, reduction in revenue for universities, loss of tax and talent from the skilled migrants now making plans to work elsewhere, and a colossal dent in the UK’s soft power. Even many Leavers quietly admitted that the UK might suffer economically and politically, at least in the short term, though they assured us that the advantages (the muezzin call of “Sovereignty!” that we hear five times daily) would eventually compensate.

Should article 50 be triggered, the ultimate fate of the country will hinge, of course, on the exit negotiations. The omens here are not good. We started out by offending our longstanding allies with our arrogant (and baseless) announcement that we would be better off without them. Theresa May’s bullish stance and the casually offensive remarks of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage then rubbed salt into the wound. And given that the EU is keen to make the prospect of leaving as unattractive as possible to deter other members from following suit, and given our woeful shortage of skilled trade negotiators, I see very little chance of us emerging from these talks with a lovely cake and a pleasant throb in the belly.

The UK, then, looks set to end up poorer, more divided, and more isolated on the world stage – at a time when the authoritarian right is enjoying an alarming renaissance, when Donald Trump’s presidency is destabilising world peace, when radical Islam still poses a potent threat, and when Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions are gathering momentum.

Brexit risks being not just a faltering step backwards from economic, political and cultural standpoints, but a giant leap.

It comes as no surprise, then, that applications from foreign students to study at UK universities have already fallen by 7%. It will not shock you, either, that a large number of EU citizens resident in the UK are making preparations to leave. For some, the vote on Wednesday 8th February against the amendment on article 50 guaranteeing their rights was the final straw.

These are not scroungers, dossers or health tourists. These are hardworking, talented human beings who contribute hugely not just to the economy, but to society. They have jobs, they speak English (often to a higher standard than some of the natives I’ve encountered online), they have built lives here, and many have found love here. But their abysmal treatment at the government’s hands, and the new wave of xenophobia unleashed by the referendum vote, have made them feel unwelcome, and uncertain about their futures.

We risk throwing out not just the bathwater, but the baby, and the bath.

I’ve heard North Korea’s nice this time of year

I should add at this point that, if the government persists in its pursuit of a recklessly hard Brexit, if liberal values continue to be scorned and undermined, if racially motivated attacks continue to multiply, then I will be joining them in leaving. Am I overreacting? You be the judge.

Never mind that Brexit has destroyed my retirement plans. Never mind that the vote has already cost me almost £2,000 in increased holiday costs and grocery bills. What truly horrifies me is what seems to be happening to my country.

For simply airing the possibility that a hard Brexit might not be the best possible outcome for the country, or for suggesting that perhaps not every single Muslim on these shores is a western-hating rapist intent on killing us all, I have been called a traitor, a moron, a “cuck”, a “libtard”, and worse. For espousing views that I once saw as synonymous with the land of my birth – openness, tolerance, cooperation, trust – I have received multiple death threats.

I suddenly live in a society where where perfidious hatemongers like this man have acquired unquestioning followings in the hundreds of thousands.

A society where views like this, and this

and this

now routinely go unchallenged.

A society where behaviour like this, this, and this is becoming normalised. People are being verbally and physically abused, in some cases killed, for the crime of wanting to help other people – or simply for wearing the skin they were born in.

The country is falling to bastards and fools: bastards who weave lies and fools who believe them.

If this is the new Britishness, then I want no part of it. I refuse to contribute any more to a country that tolerates, or even celebrates, racism, ignorance and spite. I’ll go to Canada, or Ireland, or Germany, where something like the British values of old still pertain. And I know for a fact that I will not be the only one.

A promise is just a promise

Theresa May seems intent on pursuing Brexit to its most brutal extent, no matter the cost. One can only assume that this is because she regards the referendum as a form of contract with the people of the UK; a promise.

But governments break promises all the time. The Tories broke nine of their 2015 manifesto pledges within 100 days of taking power. At least three more have gone for a burton since June 23:

But there is a larger problem here. What if fulfilling one promise means breaking others? What if enforcing a disastrous Brexit leads, as it well might, to the breakup of the UK? To new borders and sectarian strife in Northern Ireland? To lost jobs, to further cuts to the NHS, to higher taxes, more austerity? Who is to say that the Brexit promise outweighs all others?

Politicians don’t like to make U-turns because they think they are a sign of weakness. But sometimes, backtracking is the bravest thing you can do. The sunk cost fallacy has been acknowledged as a fallacy for almost as long as the argumentum ad populum. You can always turn back. And sometimes it is the only sensible course of action.

In any case, Brexit is not the “will of the people”. It is the will of at most 17.4 million people – a total that undoubtedly included many who were voting purely in protest at Cameron and austerity. Even fewer wanted a hard Brexit, with all the upheaval and economic woe that it will entail.

I was delighted to discover that you were standing as my MP. You seemed that rare and precious thing: a politician with brains, integrity, conviction. A man who thought and spoke well and was not afraid to take an unpopular stance. As a result, in the 2015 general election, I put a cross next to a Labour candidate’s name for the first time. When Labour lost, and Jeremy Corbyn took over the leadership, I thought he, too, seemed a decent man.

But unless you, and the Labour party, abandon your policy of pusillanimous submission to Theresa May’s every unmandated whim, unless you begin making substantive efforts to minimise the damage wrought by Brexit, and in particular, unless you start offering some credible support to my European friends in this country, whom you have, until this point, unforgivably betrayed, I will have no choice but to switch my allegiance to the Liberal Democrats, the only party that has shown consistent integrity on this issue. Until I emigrate, of course. Then you can do what the hell you like.

History is studded with stories of people in power faced with difficult choices. On the one hand, the safe option: give in to the will of the most vocal, even though they know the consequences are likely bad. On the other, ignore the clamour of the ill-informed, have the courage of your convictions, and choose the more difficult, but ultimately more beneficial, course of action. Those who choose the first path are invariably, like Pilate, reviled. Those who choose the second are feted as heroes.

You don’t eradicate the language and behaviour documented above by appeasing it. You eradicate it by fighting it with every sinew. Every day these bastards are not resisted, they grow bolder. To allow a hard Brexit is to pander to their tiny-minded, combative, backward, binary vision of the world.

How will you be remembered?

Yours

Andy Bodle

A patriot and a traitor

I am British, and glad to be British. But first and foremost, I am a human being

A fair few insults have been lobbed my way over the last six months. “Snowflake.” “Moron.” “Condescending prick.” “Cuck.” “Elitist.” “Libtard.” Most of them hit with all the force of a bullet thrown by a child, because most of the lobbers know nothing about me, and the rest know nothing at all. The most interesting one, by virtue of its sheer absurdity, was “traitor”.

The reasoning, I think, is that by arguing for the UK to stay in the European Union, or at least to remain on the closest terms possible, I am somehow denigrating it. Because I would prefer that my motherland remain a member of a progressive trade and customs union than become an inward- and backward-looking pariah state, I deserve, in the eyes of some, to be thrown in the Tower.

This is wrong-headed on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin, but here goes: I love my country. I love the gnarly combes of Exmoor, the wind-lashed crags of Gwynedd, Oxford’s defiant skyline, Whitby’s apologetic charm, the breathless majesty of the Lakes, Edinburgh, august and Escherian, the clumsy clash of then and now that is London. I love the internationally scorned food and the wildlife and the literature and the heritage and the majority of the people, and I don’t even mind the climate (England’s rainy reputation is overblown, and it’s never too hot or too cold for more than a few days). Crime is low, unemployment is low, the police and judiciary aren’t a law unto themselves, and until recently at least, most of our politicians seemed to rate the common people’s needs almost as highly as their own.

In short, I’m a reasonably well-travelled man, and I’ve yet to find another place on earth I’d rather live.

Now I’ve always been under the impression that when you love something, you want the best for it. And I happen to think that close cooperation with your neighbours, unfettered trade, attracting the best talent from around the world and open borders (with appropriate security checks) are beneficial to the UK – more so than isolationism, anyway – and 40 years of relative peace and prosperity would seem to back me up.

Only in the mind of a raving lunatic could taking a sober view of your country’s strengths and weaknesses be equated with hating it. Only someone who has read the Daily Express and nothing but the Daily Express could pretend that an aversion to huge risks being taken with your country’s economy and reputation is tantamount to treason. If your dad wants to bet the family house on a poker game, it is not treacherous to try to dissuade him. You’re doing it for his welfare as well as yours.

You are free to disagree with any of my reasoning here, any of my logic, or indeed my conclusion (provided you have reliable evidence to back it up) – but don’t you fucking dare question my motive. I may not be your kind of patriot, but I will defend the values of this country with my dying breath.

Whether I am proud of my country is a different question. Yes, I feel lucky, and grateful, to have been born in a relatively safe and prosperous country, where the citizens enjoy extensive choice, wide-ranging freedoms and where many, if not all, have opportunities to improve themselves. And during major sporting events, I generally root for England or Team GB, because, well, it’s more fun if you pick a side.

But proud? What’s your definition? In my view, you can only truly be proud of something if you have personally contributed to it. If you write a good book, or help build a sturdy house, or raise a child who wins a public speaking competition, then you are perfectly within your rights to be proud. But I don’t believe you have that privilege if your connection to the success is entirely coincidental.

Between 1845 and 1852, a million Irish men, women and children died during the potato famine, thanks largely to negligence by the British. Does that make you feel bad? From 1899 to 1901, 28,000 Boer women and children and at least 20,000 black people died in concentration camps set up in South Africa by the British Empire. Do you accept personal responsibility for that? During the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952 to 1960, at least 5,000 Kenyans were tortured by British soldiers. Shouldn’t you be ashamed?

Of course not. You had nothing to do with any of these events. But if that’s your logic – if you won’t carry the can for things you didn’t do – then how can you bask in the glory of England’s 1966 World Cup victory in 1966? How can you take pride in the Industrial Revolution or the Battle of Waterloo when you had no hand in either? How can you take any credit for Team GB’s Olympic medal haul in Beijing?

I’m careful not to litter, I pay my taxes, recycle, hold doors open for people, give odds and sods to the homeless, donate to a few charities and generally try to show consideration to my fellow man. But since I consider such behaviour the baseline for human decency, and since none of it has made Britain appreciably greater, no, I can’t say I feel proud, per se. And unless you’ve personally done something to add to the country’s wealth or reputation, neither should you.

I have a theory as to why the Brexit debate has divided the country so bitterly – why facts and reason are so often tossed aside in favour of emotion and aggression, and why so many people, from both Leave and Remain camps, have “doubled down” since the vote, becoming ever more convinced of their own rectitude and ever angrier with their opponents. It all boils down to this question of national pride and to our core sense of identity.

Most psychologists are agreed that humans base their self-image – the picture you have of yourself in your own head – on a few simple concepts. There’s no consensus on which is the most important, and they probably vary from person to person anyway, but chief among them are gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, sexuality, age, political affiliation and job. If someone were to ask, “Who are you?”, you’d probably reply something like, “I’m a middle-aged straight white British male writer.”

These concepts are very important to us – fundamental, in fact, to our sense of wellbeing. When they are threatened, we become defensive, sometimes to the point of irrationality. This may be why people are often accused of being “hysterical” when they talk about race issues, or gender equality. Because these subjects are so precious to us, we don’t always think straight when thinking and talking about them. We use emotive language, we oversimplify, our hearts run away with our heads.

For some people, their race and/or nationality is such a core component of their self-image that it blots out everything else. It trumps values, personality, rational argument. According to their maddeningly simple world-view, things like me are good and things unlike me are bad. Tell them they must choose between saving the life of a white British paedophile and a Pakistani doctor and they’ll choose the Brit every time.

I am not immune to those impulses. When someone attacks my gender, or my town, or my football team, I feel that rush of blood, and I want to spring to the defence of the People Like Me. But I also know that this sort of tribal thinking is dangerous.

When your mind works this way, in this automatic, tribal, binary, type-1, caveman kind of way, you think of life as a zero-sum game. You think every gain for another tribe is a loss for your own. But history shows us that life is categorically not zero-sum. Trade benefits both parties. Marriage (happy ones, at least) benefits both parties. The most successful creatures on earth – ants, bees, termites, chimpanzees – are the social species, the cooperators, the traders, the sharers, the communicators, the dividers of labour. It is the unparalleled cooperative skills of humans that have propelled us to become the dominant life-form on earth.

Tribal thinking – the unthinking, slavish devotion to People Like Me – lies behind all the -isms: sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia. Tribal thinking has been a major factor in every war.

But we move on. Sexism, racism and homophobia are on the wane, for good reason. The more humanity shakes off this mindset, the further it advances. Our time on this planet has been marked with less violence and fewer wars because we have slowly figured out that US VERSUS THEM is not the answer. US WITH THEM is infinitely more productive.

That’s why I try to fight the tribal impulse. Certainly, nationality and race are measures of how we see ourselves, but they’re not the only measure, and they’re probably among the least useful ones. Instead of building our self-image on accidents of birth, we can use other foundations: the company we keep, what we say, what we write, what we do.

I am British. I am glad to be British. But I am not glad to be British simply because I was born in Berkshire. I am glad to be British because a majority of people with whom I happen to share this little isthmus share many of my values. Values of tolerance and curiosity and openness and inventiveness and hope. And if those values are ever eroded, I may well stop being glad to be British.

I am British. But first and foremost, I am a human being.

I had planned to bang on at my usual mind-numbing length about the relative merits and dangers of patriotism and nationalism and the differences between them, but while researching this post, I discovered that far finer minds than mine – some of the greatest intellects ever to stalk this earth – have already done most of the heavy lifting. So to round off, here’s their wisdom on the subject.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Samuel Johnson

“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”
Bertrand Russell

“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
Albert Einstein

“The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?”
Pablo Casals

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.”
George Bernard Shaw

“If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident.”
Montesquieu

“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.”
Socrates

“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.”
Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times

“Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.”
Richard Aldington

“Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious.”
Oscar Wilde

“A patriot loves his country; a nationalist hates everyone else’s.”
Georges Clemenceau

“Patriotism is the love of one’s country and the desire to serve her; nationalism the hatred of others and the desire to do them ill.”
Pierre de Coubertin

“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.”
Guy de Maupassant

“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.”
Sydney J. Harris

“Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.”
Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism

[Thought I’d better put a positive one in, for balance. But there really aren’t many.]

“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”
Arthur C Clarke