Lauren Booth
At the weekend, in London, tens of thousands of Britons teemed onto the streets to protest the exit of the UK from the European Union. The aim, according to march organisers, was to stop the government from triggering Article 50, the formal process of political and financial divorce from our former continental partners.
Anger and frustration at the close result of 51.9% to 48.1% in favour of leaving was spiced at the march, with dry humour. Baguettes were waved in the air by younger voters supporting ‘Bremain’.
Slogans chanted including the satisfyingly wry and alliterative ‘Fromage not Farage.’
It usually takes a war to draw such great numbers onto UK streets, such as happened in 2003 against the invasion of Iraq, or a death. This is because this particular outpouring of shock, bordering on national grief, reminds us of another event almost two decades ago that sent a shudder down the collective spine - the death of the former Princess of Wales, Diana.
I was in Hyde Park with the crowd, watching her funeral on a hastily erected giant screen. The scenes were nothing like I, as a Londoner, had experienced before. There was a man behind me dressed in a butlers outfit. Maybe he was a butler. People were publicly weeping. My fellow countryfolk were shedding tears, wailing, in the open air for others to see. Where were we for heavens sake, Los Angeles?
The whole outpouring of love mixed with grief was just so - American.
There is something of the United States about this vote too. Over there, it takes a monstrous mistake to awake thinking folk from their sugar and CNN intellectual coma. How else could Donald Trump be within arms reach of running for President? In the UK more than half the country is struggling with the growing certainty that we’ve all been really, really, dumb; that we, the voters, were duped into apathy during the drawn out Brexit campaign; that when asked are you voting in or out, instead of the passion now on our streets, many of us could barely raise a wry shrug for a way of life which everyone under forty has taken for granted. Freedom of movement to Europe - of course we’re British! Want to work in Spain for the summer, move to France (as I did for six years) trade with 27 neighbouring national partners - yeah why not?
Having taken all these bonuses as part of our existence for so long, we then marched ourselves lemming-like to the cliff’s edge of international oblivion. So, here we are crying again over a loss we collectively have to come to terms with - fast.
Is it possible for a nation to go to sleep fairly sensible one decade and awake in another emotionally retarded? Yet this is what we are looking at when Google crashes with Briton’s, after the event, collectively searching the terms ‘What is the EU.’
Then there is Nigel Farage’s taunting of MEP’s in the European Parliament earlier this week to choke down. Farage, lampooned the political class of Spain, France, Germany and 24 other states for ‘never having had a real job’ and ‘not living in the real world.’!
The usually bored circular chamber erupted from time to time in a rare show of animation. There were cheers from fellow right wing anti immigration parties such as Le Pen’s Front Nationale. For the most part the MEP’s were broadly mocking of the man who can take all the credit he deserves for ‘reshaping Britian’ into the mess it’s currently in.
His brash, unhelpful tirade, made me think of an Iraqi attache to the consul in London, who questioned the changing face of British politics back in 2007 when Gordon Brown was briefly Prime Minister. Iraq at the time was being primed for the slow, withdrawal of British troops. The Chilcott enquiry released in a few days will bring those memories into sharp relief. At that time, Brown needed to deal gently with Iraqi leaders to broker an exit that would (don’t laugh) leave the militarily occupied land in a ‘stable condition to move forward.’
The attache speaking to me at the Arab Ambassadors Dinner, was a gifted diplomat, who spoke four languages. He talked about the way in which he had been kept waiting by Prime Minister Brown for well over an hour the day before. This, he pointed out was far from unusual when meeting a world leader. What was not traditional protocol was for the underling from the Foreign office sent to chat him out the door to know ‘nothing about anything.’
‘The graduate they sent to fob me off- he was…an idiot.’ The highly educated Iraqi representative, a specialist in international relations and political history was rudely walked out the door by a kid sent to appease him as his country shattered beneath the military boots and political mismanagement of Britons leaders. A newbie of little to no intellectual caliber ‘spoke no Arabic whatsoever and proceeded to say ‘well these problems in Iraq have been going on for more than a decade.’
A decade, seriously? The consul representative was livid. He missed, he said they way in which the British Foreign office and diplomatic corps had a classy touch to their empirical aims- where they could invade and steal certainly, but at the same intelligently debate their objectives in the region with more recourse to history than the 1980’s. They had, in short, British good manners.
Farage is not even close to being a political leader of real might. His UKIP party has precisely one member of parliament. He is mocked in the one place he had a voice, the EU. The former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said during the televised debacle: “I am shocked, Mr Farage. You are presenting yourself as the defender of the little man, while you have an offshore financial construction.” Verhofstadt then added: “OK, let’s be positive, we are getting rid of the biggest waste of EU budget: your salary.”
What the world witnessed this week in the European parliament during Nigel Farage’s outburst was what a stupid man who has been sacked might do. He took his metaphorical pants down and wiggled his exposed derriere at those with actual power. The jeers are still ringing in our ears.
With no partners in the regional vicinity who right now love our shattering little union (Scotland and N Ireland voted to Remain), our last hope was perhaps the stylish charm of Europe’s diplomats.
Instead, our political parties implode in ego-led power stuggles. And we, the public, as in the days after Diana’s death, jettison the Dunkirk spirit to huddle tearfully around screens bemoaning our rulers. Or we gather in public ironically waving baguettes in the air.
The writer is a journalist, broadcaster and media consultant: www.laurenbooth.org , Twitter:@LaurenBoothUK
