🧵Well worth a RE-READ: the late AA Gill's pre-#Brexit Ref words (abridged)
"It was the woman on .@bbcquestiontime that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in 1/
the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, w/her National Health face & weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her & she shouted: ‘All I want is my country back. Give me my country 2/
back.’
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress & the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: ‘Back from what? Back from where?’ Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the Outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. 3/
Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles 4/
and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles.
Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to 5/
a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity. 6/
We all know what ‘getting our country back’ means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia.
The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective ‘yesterday’ with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain 7/
(England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved ‘peak Blighty’.
It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art 8/
will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as ‘If’, no writer a touch on Shakespeare
or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no
hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the 9/
White Cliffs & that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.
The dream of #Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking 10/
yesterday. In the #BrexitFantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, 11/
then just listen to the language they use: ‘We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the ‘Great’ back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.’
This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. 12/
In the #Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird w/ his television, Barnes Wallis & his bouncing bomb, & Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.
All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless 13/
Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays 14/
and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots. 15/
There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the #EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected w/ Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU & at worst it’s 16/
been neutral for them. The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most Outies identify with is ‘women’s liberation has gone too far’. Everything has gone too far for them, 17/
from political correctness - well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? - to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting 18/
Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand-dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and 19/
numbers and more than eight digits. [..] We listen to the Brexit lot talk abt the trade deals they’re going to make w/ EU after we leave, & the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex w/ your ex.” 20/ ENDS
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