Brexit, or How to be Serious after the Referendum

High up in the pantheon of British values-perhaps among those that the Conservative Government wants to be taught to children in schools-is our famed British sense of humour.Everybody, British and foreign, seems to agree that we are the funny man of Europe.If the notoriously humourless bureaucrats of Brussels were to create the post of EU commissioner for jokes, there is no doubt that the job would go to a Brit.Or perhaps: would have gone to a Brit.It is telling how much difficulty I have with tenses when talking about Britain and Europe.When someone has died, we have difficulty switching from the present to the past.Here, we are not sure whether Britain's membership of the EU has really gone, or whether it is still clinging on and might yet miraculously revive.As I write, the Government has yet to trigger Article 50.Britain's Europeanness is in a coma that we, the electorate, have induced, hovering, like Schrdinger's cat, between life and death, and no-one has dared open the box.It might, of course, be suggested that Britain has always occupied this threshold position in relation to Europe.A passer-by who stands chatting on the doorstep and can't quite make up his mind whether to accept the invitation to come in for a cup of tea, a guest at the end of the evening who lingers in the hallway, unsure whether to stay a bit longer and call a cab or run for the last tube.But now, Britain is the European Union's living dead, its old nag at the knacker's yard, dumbly waiting for the merciful bolt of Article 50.This situation-the zombification of Britain in Europe, one might call it-is likely to last for years and, in so many areas of public life, one can only begin to imagine its stultifying and uncanny effects.But, on an emotional level, it leaves one in limbo, not knowing whether one ought to be in mourning, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.Many Remainers (remoaners, as the pro-Brexit press now calls them) have already shed tears over Brexit.On the morning of the result, I took my children, as usual, on the District Line from their East London home to their school, the French lyce, in South Kensington.Sitting between them in a curiously tense and silent tube carriage, I had to explain to them-in French, quietly but with intensity-what had happened, why that decision went against values that I hold dear and values that they ought also to cherish, but also reassure them that their future would nonetheless be bright.Brexit for children.Coming from a middle-class household and with a privileged background, their future will be bright and, in practical terms, as young holders of both British and French passports, Brexit

Brexit · Conservative government · Economic history · Economics · European union · International trade · Linguistics · Media studies · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Referendum · Sociology · Cyprus History, Politics, Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US

• The Brexit syndrome

  Open Access•Nathan Schlanger•Antiquity•2018

  Add to list