Life After Britain

The night before the EU referendum, the clouds prophetically darkened and a terrible storm broke over Lewes. My wife, who had been helping at a book launch in London, sent a text asking me to pick her up from Haywards Heath.

As I drove through the blinding rain, trying to work out where the road was, I thought about the following day's referendum and confidently concluded that the Leave campaign had lost its momentum. At the final moment, people would step back from the edge and take comfort in the fact that at least they had made their feelings clear. But I was wrong.

It feels as if someone has lit a fuse. This isn't just the end of Great Britain in Europe, but of Great Britain itself. In a few years' time, the famous Union Jack will be redundant and if there is still a United Kingdom, it will probably just consist of England and Wales.

People around the world are rightly asking why a successful, prosperous country has pressed the self-destruct button. In Britain, many of the 48% who voted for Remain are in a state of shock and anger.

Looking at the post-referendum statistics, it is clear that the country is split down the middle and that, rather than simply being a conflict between left and right, the divide is between old and young, rural and urban, graduates and non-graduates and, most destructively, Scotland and Northern Ireland versus England and Wales. Never has the ancient Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times', been more apposite.

I rarely write about politics, but as so many people are offering their two penn'orth, here are mine. It will be nothing new to British readers, but might be of mild interest to people elsewhere.

I think that the referendum result was largely about immigration and the pace of change that has taken place during the last decade or so. There has been a steady Commonwealth immigration to the UK since the Empire Windrush first arrived in 1948, but it was largely limited to the cities and those towns that had an industrial base, like Bradford, Luton and Oldham.

As recently as the 1980s, vast swathes of Britain were barely touched by immigration. There was an unofficial apartheid between two alternate visions of Britain: one a multiracial, multicultural, metropolitan society; the other, a more traditional, homogeneous one.

Overall, society was changing, but at a pace that all but the most bigoted could cope with. High levels of emmigration counterbalanced the influx and even during the 1950s and 60s, when Britain was supposedly 'flooded' with immigrants, the net migration averaged at about 12,000 a year.

But during the last decade, two things have changed dramatically. First, the level of net migration has risen to between 200,000 to 300,000 per year - in context, this is the equivalent to adding the population of the city of Brighton and Hove every year. Second, the distribution of migrants has been over a much wider area, often in places that had been untouched by earlier waves of immigration. In Wisbech, for example, around a third of the population are now of Eastern European origin.

Many voiced their fears about the rising level of immigration, but were frequently dismissed as racists. The famous encounter between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy perfectly summed up the divide between the metropolitan classes and those who felt left behind in a changing society.

Why did people feel so threatened? Was it simple bigotry, or a legitimate objection to the workings of global capital? I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but I think it might be pertinent.

A few years ago, I worked for a business that employed 200 people in a huge warehouse. When I started, the workforce consisted entirely of locals, then one week, a few Latvians joined. From the moment they started, it was clear that the Latvians were superior to their English counterparts: harder working, mostly better educated and nearly always far more motivated. The management took notice and recruited more.

My work often took me to other recycling companies and, time after time, I saw migrants working uncomplainingly in often awful conditions, doing dull, repetitive work in dim, unheated warehouses. The local people, who didn't find the minimum wage as alluring as their Eastern European colleagues, struggled to compete and began to resent the rising local rents and competition for work.

When the mainstream political parties failed to take the issue of immigration seriously, those who felt ignored and disenfranchised voted for UKIP in increasing numbers. David Cameron won the last election by undermining UKIP with the promise of a referendum. History may remember him as the man who unwittingly sacrificed Great Britain to win an election.

The referendum campaign has been a pretty lamentable affair, full of bigotry, hysteria, cheap sentiment and misinformation on both sides. Interestingly, although many dubious figures were bandied around, the economic arguments had far less impact than the ones based on principles.

I think the decision to vote to leave the EU was a desperate act by those who felt that this was their last chance to halt a tide of change that had already made the English an ethnic minority in London.

The fact that only half of the net annual migration came from within the EU was never really highlighted. EU migrants were also increasingly blamed for the rise in house prices when, in truth, they were only one factor in a complex picture.

Overall, I didn't witness any real anti-European sentiment, even towards the migrants from Eastern Europe. In the warehouse I worked next to, the attitude was more one of "You can't blame them for coming here, but where will it all end?". However, there was a real, visceral anger towards the middle classes, the institution of the EU and the metropolitan elite.

This has been a cultural revolution and a consensus has been shattered.

In a way, this conversation I had yesterday with my mother is indicative of the mindset of many:

"Well, we won. Now they won't be able to come over here and take our benefits."

"But most of them aren't on benefits. They often work a lot harder than we do."

"Well then, they won't be able to take our jobs."

For me, the referendum always felt like a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. The Leave campaign was dominated by jingoistic rhetoric and unreliable economics. The more sophisticated arguments by figures like Tony Benn, about democracy and accountability, were rarely heard.

On the other hand, the Remain campaign conflated the EU with Europe and frequently implied that anyone who voted to leave was a backward-looking racist. As someone pointed out, all racists will vote Leave, but not all Leave voters are racists.

The tragedy with this referendum, like the Scottish one, was that it offered only two extremes. I suspect that most Scots would have voted for the 'Devolution Max' option if they'd had the choice, and in Thursday's referendum, more people would have voted to remain in the European Union if a compromise had been on the table. But for the EU, the principle of free movement was non-negotiable.

So that's it for Great Britain, probably. Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler tried to vanquish Great Britain, but a peaceful referendum succeded where they had failed. There may now be a vacant seat on the UN Security Council and there'll be no Team GB in the 2020 Olympics.

It's not all doom and gloom. With around 90% of the UK population, the remaining rump of England and Wales will still be an economic and cultural power, but it won't be the same.

Mea Cuppa - The Decline of Tea Drinking in Britain

On Twitter last week, Peter Sipe asked me what I thought about a Washington Post article about the decline of tea drinking in Britain (apparently, it's dropped from 68 grams per week in 1974 to 25 grams per week 40 years later). I read it and shuddered with horror. Without a single shot being fired, the British have become a nation of coffee drinkers. It's as if the ravens have left the Tower of London.

The Washington Post claims that tea drinking is the most British thing there is, so what has gone wrong? I think there are several possible answers:

1. We've gone to the dogs

Tea was a quintessentially British beverage because it offered a mild, barely perceptible stimulation, as restrained as the twitching upper lip of a dying Spitfire pilot. It was a drink that vicars and maiden aunts could consume it by the gallon without unleashing repressed passions. Labourers cherished it because the act of drinking a cuppa offered a brief, elysian respite from the drudgery of their working day.

In recent years, we've turned our backs on moderation and self-control, placing more value on self-expression and cheap sentiment. We began to let it all hang out around the same time that city gents stopped wearing bowler hats (if I had the time, I'm sure that I could plot out a causal relationship) and this was accompanied by a growing preference for stimulants. The 'nice cup of tea' and the traditional pint of warm, weak beer became replaced by amphetamine-like coffees and ever-stronger alcoholic beverages.

We went from becoming a nation that kept calm and carried on through the Blitz to one that wept like infants when Princess Diana died. We've gone to the dogs.

2. Travel has broadened the mind

Around the same time that gentlemen were abandoning their bowler hats, British people were discovering the delights of having a summer holiday in a place where it didn't rain half the time. They loved the climate, but weren't so keen on the cuisine - "Ooh Joan, you can't get a decent cuppa anywhere and the food's so garlicky". After a life of eating bland, overcooked food and weak tea, Mediterrnean cuisine must have been as overstimulating as LSD.

But after a while, people got a taste for 'foreign muck' and the supermarkets saw a growing demand for more exotic dishes, while old favourites like suet puddings, faggots and fish paste sandwiches saw a steady, inexorable decline. Our changing tastebuds, once shaped by a national cuisine of flavourless food and drink, now sought something a little stronger than tea.

3. Tea has got worse while coffee has become nicer

Half a century ago, a cup of tea would have usually been made in the traditional way, with loose leaves in a warmed pot, brewed for at least two minutes before being served in decent china. On the other hand, a cup of coffee would usually look and taste like washing-up water.

Then two things happened: some bastard invented the teabag and coffee began to become drinkable.

The big coffee revolution took place in the mid-80s, coinciding with the advent of yuppies. I'm pretty sure of this because when I went to university in Wales in the early 80s, coffee in cafes was usually undrinkable, but when I returned to London in 1987, everyone seemed to be drinking cappuccinos. I felt as if I'd been away for 20 years.

Coffee became seen as the drink of the cosmopolitan, go-getting white collar worker, while tea was the choice of builders and old people (there isn't time to venture into the dark world of herbal tea here, but it was the drink of choice of some of the worst people I've ever worked with - individuals who'd perfected passive aggressive behaviour into a martial art).

Those are my three main theories. I'm not sure which one is the nearest to the truth.

I don't have strong feelings about the relative merits of drinking tea versus coffee. I like both, but I dislike the coffee culture that has sprung up during the last 20 years. I'm annoyed by seeing people walk around clutching cardboard cups; perhaps because it represents that whole '24/7' culture of being permanently on the go. Good people fought for their right to have a tea break. Everyone should stop and sit down for 15 minutes.

I also hate the wanky 'barista' nonsense, as if operating a coffee making machine is a specialist occupation, like tree surgery and stonemasonry. And why is there so much choice? Maybe we did need something more imaginative than black/white/with/without sugar, but if I offer to buy someone a coffee, I don't expect to have to remember some nonsense about a double skinny mocha decaf latte while I approach the counter. It's symptomatic of a spoilt brat consumer culture, in which all needs and inclinations must be catered for.

On the other hand, tea is the drink of a civilised nation. Like coffee it has caffeine, but at a level where it feels like a relaxant rather than a stimulant. Having a cup of tea isn't just about drinking; it's about stopping and gathering's one's thoughts. Unless you have a cast iron esophagus, a cup of tea cannot be drunk quickly and that is one of its greatest virtues.

The future looks grim, but the tide may turn and the new generation of young people may turn their backs on skinny mochas, tattoos and long beards. I live in hope. In the meantime, my household will continue to drink tea in the afternoon, accompanied by a slice of something nice.


I will finish with this homage to tea by Chap Hop artist Professor Elemental: