Brexit — it’s complicated

Very very complicated. It is also painful at the purely personal level. A week ago there were 155 rupees to the pound, today there are 139.63. My British Old Age Pension is paid direct from UK into my Pakistan current account and it is going to be a lesser sum next month courtesy of the slide in the pound since the UK voted to leave the EU. I happen to know that there are a goodly number of elderly British Pakistanis living here who are dependent on their UK pension. Life just got that little bit harder for them.

Rather than unpack yet again the minutiae of this seismic event — and it really is seismic, with effects that are going to be felt around the world for years to come, few of them good — let us instead stand back and take a wider, longer, view.

Nothing is forever. Nothing. We may like to think that the rocks we anchor our lives to are going to always be there. Not so. Civilisations and empires rise and fall — Greece, Rome, Egypt, the bloody Brits heaven help us, the Ottomans, the Incas and Aztecs — and all gone. Entire religions come and go as well. Others spring up. Very few last more than a couple of millennia, mere seconds on the cosmic clock. But the cycle tends to be slow, the changes almost infinitesimal, so small as to almost not be noticed. Not so Brexit.

And the European Union, the EU, that isn’t forever either, and in the last week we may have seen the beginning of the end for a complex set of alliances. The forces that are currently ripping apart the British Labour Party, toppled Prime Minister David Cameron and put a dent in my pension are all present in varying degrees in many other of the 27 member states.

The number crunchers in the UK tell us that the scales were tipped by the Boomers (my generation), and the Millennials shot themselves in the foot by just not coming out in sufficient numbers to vote, damn them. And it caught everybody on the hop. The Remainers thought they would just about edge it, the Leavers did not think they would win but would get a protest vote of sufficient clout to translate to electoral power, the bookmakers called it seriously wrong and the pollsters, still smarting from getting it horrendously wrong in their forecasts for the last British general election — got it horrendously wrong again. By last Friday evening nothing was the same as it was a mere 24 hours before. And it never will be.

Zooming out once more it is possible to see an entire continent in flux, caught completely unawares and with no Plan B… or even a Plan A in the context of many of the Brexiteers who based their voting decision on a primitive and easily-touched xenophobia that was worked for all it was worth by the leave campaigners — which brings us back to the purely personal.

Just as I am measurably poorer financially as a result of the referendum on the EU, so I am more fearful, particularly for my family currently in the UK. Our little multicultural unit has toddled along for nearly 22 years now, added a couple of kids along the way, shifted between the UK and Pakistan and back again as jobs, academic aspirations and residency requirements all had to be juggled.

There have been a couple of racist incidents along the way. Police informed. Dealt with. We’ll live with it. But Brexit has brought to the surface something that was in a very shallow grave. I should know as I was one of those that helped bury it in the course of a 26-year career in local government that started in the early 1970s. I and my colleagues sought to counter racism, to implement the legislation, to bind equality and diversity into the national genome. And we kidded ourselves that yes, the tide had turned. It hadn’t of course and the last week has seen that which had a false sense of permanence — the EU — cracking asunder and the altogether more durable inner darkness leak out. Some things are more forever than others.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2016.

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