I’ve been contemplating writing this blog for some time. We stand on the eve of departure, and the June 2016 referendum seems so long ago. I havered for ages, thinking that there will be so many ‘personal takes’, so no one will be interested. Well that doesn’t really matter, does it, since this blog is as much for me as for anyone else.
Then I took this picture today, and I intend to use it for my blipfoto entry. I can also use it metaphorically, in order to articulate how I feel.
Basically, rubbish. Everything feels scratched and worn and used. Uncared for. What I feel have been so many reasonable arguments for Remain, for a proper ‘soft Brexit’ (i.e. full alignment, EEA-style, plus Customs Union for Northern Ireland not the nonsense that people now call ‘soft Brexit’, i.e. May’s deal), for a declaratory system for citizens’ rights, etc. etc. have all been ignored (or rubbished). But no plausible arguments have been offered in return. Just some reference, still ongoing, to ‘The Will of the People’. And the Brexit election, which was always going to end in tears. So those are the meaningless pink bits scrawled on the scratched and rusty metal. Those markings don’t make sense, and they certainly aren’t pretty. Only the lock is shiny. Because that feels like the reality of leaving. That we are being locked in the asylum, and we’ve thrown away the keys that might allow us to escape. We’re locked in with the sort of women in front of whom I sat on an aeroplane from Southampton in December. Brexit-loving, Nigel-groupies. One had the decided view that the EU is a Mafia-organisation. I realise, of course, that my little bubble is just that. A bubble. But it’s my bubble and it helps me survive. But, oh boy, I did feel like turning round to her and saying, in a very loud voice: “It seems you are coming to enjoy the Christmas market in Edinburgh. Please keep your opinions to yourself, as three out of every four people you meet in Edinburgh voted to remain. And would do so again. So basically you aren’t welcome. If you can’t go home, then at least stay quiet”. Sadly, I didn’t. I chickened out.
But I’m not sentimental about all this. I have sympathy with people like Darren McGarvey (@lokiscottishrap on twitter) who feel that the EU has been oversentimentalised in the last few days.
Equally, people have replied to his tweet reminding him of the environmental standards, the social standards, the health and safety standards, all now under threat as we risk imminent vassalage to Trump’s America (oh, yes, I think he will be re-elected come November).
Professionally, it definitely feels bad. Pretty much my entire career has been focused on EU law, and it’s only recently that I’ve developed some sidelines (well, new focuses) that have helped me survive. I wrote a whole book last summer on Citizenship and Constitutional Law, in large measure for reasons of distraction activity. But I’m sufficiently close to the end of my career that I know I don’t have to go back to teach Brexit Law #101 when I come to the end of my funded research fellowship in 18 months time, or so. I have options. Partly because I have options, the period since the referendum has worked out differently. I haven’t been as involved as I expected to be in the debates about Brexit. I admire those who have engaged consistently and effectively. But almost immediately, I knew this wasn’t for me. Having a knee replacement operation in October 2016, followed by 9 months in Finland from September 2017, cleared me out of the contacts lists of all journalists. I was happy not to receive any calls, and virtually no emails.
I have options personally, as well. We live in Scotland — it is a European country. There’s the aforementioned prospect of retirement. There are trips to various places (although #flygskam is starting to get to me too). It’s expensive and tiring to be constantly on the go, quite apart from the environmental impact. My partner has an Irish passport… We have choices, individually and together, and we shall take them. Our own ‘exits’. We’ve found our voice has been ignored and our loyalty should not be taken for granted.
We have to get over Friday 31st first, and for that there’s at least some prospect of being around like minded people, for example up at Holyrood. I need to get over myself and stop being short tempered about pretty much everything at the moment. But the first step towards doing that is to acknowledge to myself that this does feel, at the moment, quite desperate. I feel empty. I cannot envisage where we will be in 10 years time, apart from poorer and meaner in character, society and economy. Only after that acknowledgement might I find some possibility of constructive future engagement. Meanwhile, where’s the gin?
Addendums….
Inevitably, writing and posting this (and reading things that others have to say, or the memories that they have posted) got me thinking about other stuff that means a lot to me, and which I’m going to post down here, not as part of the original post, but as a set of addendums, even aides-memoire. Remember, this blog isn’t really for the readers, it’s for me, as part of my self-medication at this particularly difficult moment. And because I don’t have that much time, they’ll get posted bit by bit.
So I’ve been thinking about how I started in the field of EU law. One of my first political memories involved going along to a public meeting at Bingley Little Theatre, for the 1975 referendum. I guess I must have been instinctively in favour … I wrote something about this sense of being European, which I acquired early in life, in the preface to my last monograph in 2008. I guess my parents voted to ‘stay in the Common Market’. They were Conservative voters, and none too impressed with the election of Harold Wilson in 1974. My mother died in 2004, and I regretted very much that she wasn’t there to read the preface to the book. I gather my father voted leave in 2016, but he’s no longer around to discuss it with me — why would he want to undermine his own children and grandchildren?
I no longer remember why I chose to do what was then an optional in EEC Law in 1981–1982, in my final year of undergraduate studies. I suppose it made sense, as part of the implicit European persona — I’d studied French and German in my first year, and only turned to law in my second year. I got one of my few first class marks in that paper — in fact someone gave me to understand I’d done very well, and since Steve Weatherill took the same course that year, there was a fair bit of competition… I know exactly why I went to study in Brussels in 1982 — that was because of Basil Markesinis, who pointed me in the direction of the Wiener Anspach scholarships to study at the Institut d’Etudes Europeennes, and I duly applied and got funding. I met a few people there who’ve remained lifelong friends, like Mark Friend and (re-met more recently) Lampis Pergantis. And it set me on my way professionally, as my first job came straight afterwards at UCL, working for John Usher and Bob Hepple as a research assistant, largely on matters European, but just tentatively setting out on my own research agenda.
