I can’t help but feel an immense feeling of grief over Brexit. It feels like its a never-ending issue, which I suppose it is. I imagine every generation of politics has one big thing that everyone focusses on – miners’ strikes, the Iraq War, the recession, now Brexit. I’m not the only one feeling fatigued over the whole thing. What makes it worse is that I find the whole event too damn upsetting.
I’ve had the good fortune of becoming friends with people in the UK who have been able to move freely around the EU & have been able to come to the UK to study and I’m able to say I’ve broadened my understanding & my horizons.
Sadly, I might not get to enjoy this for much longer. With Brexit around the corner, and with BoJo proroguing parliament to (presumably) force through a ‘no deal’ Brexit with as little scrutiny from parliament as possible, it makes me want to leave my own country.
That’s not something I thought I’d ever say, or even consider, but I don’t want to be part of a country that I don’t recognise. Leaving the EU trading bloc doesn’t simply mean changing the economics of the country or how easy it is to visit Disney Land Paris, it means changing from a free & open nation that welcomes friends with open arms to becoming a country that appears to think it doesn’t need the friends it’s had for 46 years and that it can now go-it alone by becoming better friends with a Trumpian USA.
And what’s worse is that I fear it will be a stepping stone towards a country that will irrevocably harm itself: privatisation of the NHS, break-up of the Union, lack of provision for the worst off in our society and a greater increase of the already increasing poverty-wealth divide.
I’ll have to decide what I can do about it and therefore what I will do about it. But this is not my Britain, this is not my United Kingdom.
This is not my home.