Brexit
Britain has the deepest faultlines of any country I have known
British
society needs modernisation but instead Brits will be busy rebuilding
bridges they are about to tear down
Anna Lehmann
Anna Lehmann is a
recipient of the George Weidenfeld bursary, an international
journalists' exchange scheme
Friday 16 December
2016 16.47 GMT
I love British
humour. When something goes fundamentally wrong, the British laugh at
it.
Brexit? The EU now
has 1GB of free space. If that gives you a wry smile, better jokes
will be along soon – Brexit has a lot of potential to go wrong.
Travelling for two
months around Britain and Ireland, visiting Birmingham, Hull,
Grimsby, York, Edinburgh, Belfast, Newry and Dundalk, I got an idea
of why so many people voted for Brexit and how difficult it will be.
For Britain, Europe and the rest of the world.
Guardian readers
gave me inspiration for where to go and who to meet, sending nearly
100 emails after I asked for tips in my first article. “You should
visit my 76-year-old mum in Grimsby. In a Brexit heartland, she was
the one swearing at our bridge club players, telling them not to
betray their grandchildren,” wrote Paul.
It was a pleasure to
meet the resolute Mary Randall and her friends Margaret and Beat
Haessig in Grimsby, and it helped me understand people’s anxieties
and challenges in an area that has suffered a long period of economic
decline.
When Margaret was
growing up in the 1950s and 60s, Grimsby was thriving. By the time
Mary moved to the town in 1983, the decline had already begun. “But
when the fish industry went downhill there was no investment at all,”
she said. “The young people went away because there were no jobs
for them.”
They showed me
around once-busy shopping areas, now run-down, and pointed out shops
and businesses that had closed.
Travelling to Hull
the next day, practically a stone’s throw away on the other side of
the river Humber, took almost two hours because there is no proper
train connection. Local entrepreneurs told me how fed up they were
with the bad infrastructure and the lack of investment from
Westminster. I heard “you in London” a lot, even though I was
only a temporary Londoner for two months.
The people I spoke
to who had voted for Brexit and claimed to be fed up with Europe
really had more specific concerns: sinking living standards, a lack
of affordable housing, rising poverty and an inefficient NHS. All
good reasons to be disgruntled, though Brussels is hardly to blame.
The morning I left
Grimsby was the day the world learned that Donald Trump had won the
US election. The outsider had beaten the establishment. Plenty of
people, including me, felt that Brexit had happened again.
Frank Stauss, a
political consultant who has organised several election campaigns for
the Social Democrats in Germany, said Trump’s biggest asset was
“that he didn’t stand for going on with business as usual”.
Trump’s voters in the US wanted a change, and so did leave voters
in Britain. They were fed up with an establishment that promised
wealth and prosperity in the EU when they were experiencing the
opposite.
When I came to
Britain I had a picture in my mind of a divided society in which
young, urban and well-educated people had voted for remain, while
elderly and working-class people, and xenophobic ones, had voted to
stay.
But it isn’t that
simple. I met a shipowner who employs only Polish people on his
trawlers but voted to leave. (If the Poles left, he said, he would
hire Russians instead.) I talked to a porter who was proud to have
voted remain.
British society as I
experienced it has more and deeper faultlines than any other country
I have lived in – namely Poland, Sweden, Germany and Italy.
According to
research by Poverty and Social Exclusion, 30 million people in the UK
suffer from financial insecurity, 4 million people are not properly
fed and 2.3m households cannot afford to heat the living areas of
their homes. On the other hand, more billionaires live here than in
many other countries, and the economy has grown over the last six
years.
“Privileged”
young Londoners with good jobs told me that starting a family was out
of the question because they could not afford flats with enough
space. “Our parents live in houses we could never afford,” say
the millennials. The Northern Irish and Scottish complain that they
are neglected by decision-makers in London
Some Britons claim
Polish people are taking their jobs, but the Poles say they were
welcomed at first as cheap labour, then treated with mistrust when
they took on better jobs and homes. “The British liked us in these
cheap jobs and became concerned when they improved,” my friend Ania
Faluta, with whom I studied in Poland, told me. She started her
career in London 11 years ago as a cleaning woman and is now a
project manager.
It struck me
sometimes that the British are so occupied with competing – in
their jobs, dancing, baking, with other nations – that they miss
the bigger picture.
An education system
that provides chances for everybody irrespective of social
background? Well, has there ever been a Guardian editor from a
comprehensive school?
A modern childcare
system that is affordable and adapted to the needs of families? Women
told me how they jeopardised their careers by staying at home with
their toddlers because it was cheaper than sending them to nursery.
An efficient
healthcare system? I spent hours listening to my housemate’s
enraged reports about his experiences in waiting rooms.
With every week I
spent in Britain, I grew fonder of the German federal system that
allows states to set their own key issues, independent of the
government in Berlin, and of a social system that allows me to have
four children, a full-time job and to afford a two-month break
abroad.
British society
could do with modernisation, in my view. It’s so 1980s. But I doubt
if Brexit will bring that about. Instead, the British will be
occupied with rebuilding the bridges to the EU that they are just
about to tear down.
That’s what the
negotiations are aimed at, aren’t they? To leave Europe and the
European single market, and at the same time guarantee access to the
latter. Norway, which could serve as an example, is not a member of
the EU but of the European Economic Area, and has 70% of EU
directives and 17% of EU regulations in force.
Brexit seems like a
big waste of time and money, but nevertheless I’d prefer the
British to be as close as possible to the EU. When Theresa May sets
off to embrace the autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the
other Gulf countries, the democratic opposition in these countries
will be even less heard.
But the EU is also
far from perfect. Its harshest critics should not be easily
dismissed. And we Germans could do with a good deal more of the
politeness, consideration and respect that people in Britain show to
their fellow humans.
And, of course, with
some British humour. How many Germans do you need to change a
lightbulb? One! They are so effective and have no sense of humour.
You see?
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