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Brexit
has shattered something, and the shards are everywhere. The Prime Minister
is still seeking negotiations with an EU that refuses new negotiations, the
country’s two largest parties have just seen a flurry of defections, with a small
group of liberal and conservative politicians having joined forces to form a centrist party of protest, and parliament may seek to delay Brexit in order to prevent a no-deal exit. And the people?
They are feeling “meaner and angrier” as one survey suggested.

It is difficult to think of a vote that
people have taken more personally. Another piece of research by the London School of Economics revealed that the
highest predictor of a Leave vote was a negative view of non-EU immigration. As
the child of Ugandan refugees it was not hard for me to see Brexit – at least
in part – as the culmination of xenophobia that had been simmering in British society
for as long as I could remember.

But
perhaps Brexit did not shatter anything, but merely illuminated what was
already broken. The referendum process was a summary of Britain’s flaws so
perfect that it was almost artful. The campaign to remain in the EU was run by
a group of politicians utterly oblivious to the economic damage that they
had visited upon the country. The campaign to leave the EU was guided by an assortment of
disaffected and opportunistic voices, the latter of which – backed by donors of dubious provenance and criminal methods – relentlessly
stoked the fear of foreigners. Fully 700.000 British citizens were denied the opportunity to vote,
only because they were living abroad.

Global power and a wary, small island

Given
this toxic cocktail, part of me is surprised that Britain has lasted
as long in the EU as it has. Some of its citizens have always wanted their country to keep the Continent at
arm’s length. It is a strange and unique contradiction: a
swaggering global power and a wary small island, a society which on the surface
seems to be vibrantly multi-racial but which remains afraid of being overwhelmed by
the outsider. This has long been the case: The journalist Ian Cobain, in his
book “The History Thieves”, notes that “during the first decade of the 20th
century alone, around 300 invasion novels were published in Britain”. 

Brexit
was truly a moment when Britain as a nation looked in the mirror and noticed
the division and disharmony that had long been in plain view. Some might say it
is simple for me, a writer and musician who has made a new life for myself on
the Continent, to approve of the EU. It is less easy for the three groups in
which my Leave-voting friends and acquaintances found themselves. First, there
were those who have long contended that the EU has a
lack of direct accountability to its voters; secondly, those inhabitants of
small towns who argue that their wages have been undercut by cheap labour;
and thirdly, those who felt that the arrival of so many foreign faces so
quickly had left them feeling like strangers in their own country. Where I saw
consensus, the first group saw subservience; where I saw lack of worker
protection, the second group saw the ravages of globalisation; where I saw
joyous diversity, the third group saw an irreconcilable clash of cultures.