Cambridge city councillor John Hipkin: 'Brexit fills me with dread and shame'
Opinion | By John Hipkin
Is there any way out of the Brexit mess?
As a councillor, I am sometimes asked to sign a petition addressing some controversial topic such as fox-hunting or oceanic pollution, or to propose a motion in council on a similar topic which someone has kindly already worded for me!
Invariably I put aside such requests on the grounds that local councillors should not involve themselves in matters over which they have no jurisdiction or which they cannot influence. But there are also occasions when I feel that an issue is of such importance, and the implications for myself and my fellow residents are so serious, that it would be an abdication of responsibility not to state clearly where I stand. Brexit is a case in point.
Much of the debate surrounding Brexit is speculative. That our decisions will have an impact is certain but we simply cannot know precisely what their outcomes will be. We can be pretty sure, for example, that we shall feel the effects of Brexit in the cost of household goods, on industries and jobs, incomes, freedom of travel and other material aspects of everyday life but to what extent and in what manner remain to be seen. We can also be sure that it will affect us in less tangible ways: in our sense of where we stand in the world and what we stand for, in our attitudes to ‘foreigners’, our willingness to share responsibility for global challenges, such as climate change and human migration, and to co-operate with others to meet them. As we calculate the costs of Brexit we need to remember that how we feed our conscience is every bit as important as how we feed our stomach.
That being said, I contemplate our future as a nation with shame and dread. The shame comes from our having made the decision to leave the EU out of fear, rather than with confidence: fear of what ‘they’ were doing to us when had we had any vestige of true national pride we would have sought, like Germany or France, to lead the EU in the direction we favoured. Events since the 2016 referendum have only compounded the shame. We have shown incompetence in the way we have carried out the negotiations and the tone of debate at home has been spiteful and simplistic. When in the past has our country been as wayward and ignominious as it is now?
The dread comes from having to live in a country where attitudes have become so parochial and mean-spirited, where the worst features of our national character: jingoism, entitlement, xenophobia and an all pervasive smugness have spread like devouring weeds across the national landscape. A dread, too, of Brexit’s impact on the social ethos. I am pretty sure that levels of poverty and strife will rise, that disillusionment will make people angry, that the fissures between parts of the nation, classes and interest groups will widen. I have heard too many people speak of leaving the country or at least of securing a parallel nationality that might give them and their families a future bolt-hole. And presiding over this unhappy state of affairs: Theresa May? Jeremy Corbyn? Boris Johnson? David Davis? Jacob Rees-Mogg? Was there ever such a roll-call of vainglorious mediocrity!
How to extricate ourselves from this appalling mess? Of course, my analysis may prove to be wide of the mark. Maybe we shall venture forth and meet the future with confidence and ingenuity. Maybe the UK will experience an economic, social and political renaissance. Perhaps the EU will disintegrate and we shall look back with pride at our prescience in having left when we did. I fear, however, that it is more likely that we shall suffer the consequences of our decision to leave and that the title of the present chapter in our history will be: How Great Britain morphed into Little England! Insofar as there is still room for manoeuvre, we should delay our departure from the EU for as long as possible in the hope that better leaders will emerge and that the national mood will change and we will be able to find our way back into Europe. That Europe may not be so very different from the one we have left or it could be one that history has called forth in answer to challenges and opportunities which for both ‘them’ and us cannot be foreseen but could be the making of our respective futures.
