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Britain cannot leave Europe any more than Piccadilly Circus can leave London. Europe is where we are, and where we will remain. Britain has always been a European country, its fate inextricably intertwined with that of the continent, and it always will be. But it is leaving the European Union. Why?

A universal truth: nobody knows what is going to happen but everyone can explain it afterwards. If just 3% of the more than 33 million Brits who voted in this referendum had gone the other way, you would now be reading endless articles explaining how it was, after all, “the economy, stupid”, how British pragmatism finally won through, etc. So beware the illusions of retrospective determinism. There is always a mystery in how millions of individual voters make up their minds. It is the mystery of democracy.

This result was anything but inevitable; only death is that. Many television programmes during the referendum campaign featured lingering aerial shots of the white cliffs of Dover (it must have been good for the local helicopter trade). Yes, being an island makes a difference, but geography is not destiny. For centuries after the Norman invasion, England’s rulers saw it as part of a trans-Channel polity, together with their possessions in France. As in personal relationships, you can be together but apart – or apart, but still together.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Margaret Thatcher, pictured in 1975 campaigning to ‘Keep Britain in Europe’. Photograph: P Floyd/Getty Images

History matters more. When Brits deplore European laws overriding English ones, there is a resounding echo of Henry VIII’s 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome, which famously declared “this realm of England is an empire”. Yesterday, Rome, today, Brussels. When a British shopkeeper tells me “we should be governing ourselves”, he draws on a tradition of parliamentary sovereignty that reaches back to the English revolution of the 17th century, and beyond. That is different from, say, Germany, which from the Holy Roman Empire onwards has been accustomed to multiple layers of authority, all the way up from the medieval city with its own city laws to a multi-state Reich.



History influences but does not determine how we act today. When German historians tried to discover why Germany went down its disastrous “special path”, its Sonderweg, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they contrasted it with Britain. Britain, in this comparison, was the model of European normality.

So we are not unique in being unique. There is not one exceptional Britain over here and a bunch of almost identical European countries over there. Britain, with its welfare state and national health service, is in many ways a typical post-1945 European country. Every other European country has its own complicated and sometimes strained relationship with the idea of Europe and the very imperfect reality of the EU.

It is true, however, that unlike most other European countries, Britain (with the exception of the Channel Islands) did not have on its own territory the formative 20th-century experiences of war, defeat, occupation and fascist or communist dictatorship. When the UK joined the European Economic Community in the early 1970s, this was mainly a response to relative economic and political decline. Its relationship with what is now the EU has generally been more transactional, more dependent on the continent doing well economically. Britain has been, to put it a little unkindly, its fair-weather friend.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘OK, tell me what’s going on and why it’s bad for Britain’ … the ever-cynical Boris Johnson in his journalist days. Photograph: Neville Elder/Corbis via Getty Images

More important than white cliffs, Henry VIII or the 1970s is Margaret Thatcher. Not the Thatcher who wore a “Europe or bust” multi-flag sweater when campaigning for Britain to remain, in the 1975 referendum, nor the prime minister of the 1980s who pushed through the single market – without which there could never have been a single currency to go so disastrously wrong in our time. No, it’s the later Thatcher of buyer’s remorse and emotional antipathy who wrote in her memoirs of the “quintessentially un-English outlook” displayed by the European Community, going on to quote Rudyard Kipling’s poem about the Norman and the Saxon: “When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own, / And grumbles, ‘this isn’t fair dealing’, My son, leave the Saxon alone.”

This is the Thatcher I saw at a memorable meeting she convened to discuss German unification at Chequers in 1990, with her mental image of the continent in a 1940 timewarp (bad Germany, feeble France) and her smouldering resentment at being out-handbagged by Helmut Kohl. And then the twilight Thatcher who, according to her biographer Charles Moore, was for Britain leaving the EU.

Her legacy has shaped two generations of Eurosceptic politicians and journalists, in the closed circuit of Westminster. Some are journalists who became politicians: Michael Gove, Boris Johnson. A friend once told me a story about Johnson, when he was the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, bursting late into a press conference and harrumphing: “OK, tell me what’s going on and why it’s bad for Britain.” Always cynical, you see. But I used to think that was amusing.

Others are journalists behaving like politicians, dishing up half-truths and whole lies. The degree of partisanship and distortion in the British press, from the Sun’s “Queen backs Brexit” to the Express front page announcing that the EU would ban British kettles, has no rival anywhere else in Europe. And it’s so powerful because it has built, day after day, year upon year, on an emotionally appealing narrative of the plucky freedom-loving island that became a mighty empire. Declaring his support for leave three months ago, having veered around “like a shopping trolley” while trying to decide where his main chance lay, Johnson wrote that “we used to run the biggest empire the world has ever seen … are we really unable to do trade deals?”

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Gove, an equally gifted writer and orator, has played the same tune in many registers. This nostalgic optimism is the siren call of the Brexiteers: we were once great on our own, so we can be again. It’s a complete non-sequitur of course (“Carthage was once great, so it can be again”), but mighty seductive.

It would, however, be quite wrong to blame it all on Them. Look in the mirror and say after me: we are also to blame. How did we, as educators, allow such a simplistic narrative to go unchallenged by good history and civics taught at school and university? How did we, as journalists, allow the Eurosceptic press to get away with it, setting the daily news agenda for radio and television as well? How can we pro-Europeans have so underrated the painful sense of losing out from Europeanisation that I encountered on the doorstep when canvassing for a vote to remain, and which now screams through the vote of the other half of England? (“Speak for yourself,” you may retort. I do, brother, I do.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair was always reluctant to express in public his privately withering criticism of the Eurosceptic press. Photograph: Bela Szandelszky/AP

And why has generation upon generation of British politicians failed to make the positive case for the project of European integration that we call in shorthand “Europe”? Tony Blair delivered some fine pro-European speeches – in Poland, Germany or Belgium. When he made one at Oxford, I begged him to express in public his privately withering criticism of the Eurosceptic press. What got past his inner spin doctor was one short paragraph, so weaselly that it would have embarrassed even a self-respecting weasel. (Ex-prime ministers have been bravely eloquent, but only when ex.)

Yet the origins of this debacle are as much European as British. As so often, the seeds of disaster were sown in the moment of triumph; of nemesis in prior hubris. It would be an exaggeration to say that a wall will be going up at Dover because a wall came down in Berlin, but there is a connection nonetheless. In fact, there are three connections. As their price for supporting German unification, France and Italy pinned Germany down to a timetable for an overhasty, ill-designed and overextended European monetary union. As a result of their liberation from Soviet communist control, many poorer countries in eastern Europe were set on a path to EU membership, including its core freedom of movement. And 1989 opened the door to globalisation, with spectacular winners and numerous losers.

Each of these chickens has come home to roost in Britain’s referendum. Since the financial crisis exposed the structural flaws of the eurozone, the continent’s economic weakness has been a key argument for leave, just as the continent’s economic strength was a key argument for remain in the referendum of 1975, when Thatcher wore that jumper. “As for the 19 countries locked into the catastrophic, one-sized-fits-all single currency,” the Daily Mail wrote on referendum day, urging its readers to vote leave, “ask the jobless young people of Greece, Spain or France if the euro has underpinned their prosperity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Take back control’ is also the cry of Marine Le Pen (pictured), Geert Wilders and Donald Trump. Photograph: Kamil Zihnioglu/AP

The eastward enlargement of the EU in 2004 was followed by a large westward movement of people and, because of Blair’s generously miscalculated open-door policy, some 2 million of them came to Britain. They have been joined more recently by those seeking work from euro-torn Greece or Spain. Precisely because, in spite of Thatcherism, Britain is still basically a European social democracy, with generous welfare benefits, an easily accessed NHS “free at the point of need” and state schooling for all, pressures on those public services – and on housing stock in a country that for decades has built far too few homes – have been felt acutely by the less well-off. This is what I heard on the doorstep from the elderly white working-class woman and the Asian British hairdresser, not to mention the Syrian who runs a pizza parlour. It is a mistake to disqualify such people as racist. Their concerns are widespread, genuine and not to be dismissed. Unfortunately, populist xenophobes such as Nigel Farage exploit these emotions, linking them to subterranean English nationalism and talking, as he did in the moment of victory, of the triumph of “real people, ordinary people, decent people”. This is the language of Orwell hijacked for the purposes of a Poujade.

Combining and magnifying these discontents is a broader reaction against the consequences of globalisation – of which the EU is a singularly concentrated instance. Unsettled by rapid demographic and cultural change as well as social and economic liberalisation, sensing (rightly) that inequality has grown as some do spectacularly well by globalisation and others – less educated, mobile and adaptable – lose out, these “ordinary people” cry: “I don’t recognise my own country.” It’s not difficult to induce them to blame their problems on shadowy, remote, cosmopolitan and bureaucratic “elites”. (People like me, for example. When I tweeted that I had voted remain on Thursday, someone called Andy Keech tweeted back: “never lived on a council estate, never worried about his gas bill #voteleave”.) Boris Johnson is, of course, a classic elite product (Eton, Oxford), but he performs the populist pirouette of being an elite anti-elitist, the Etonian man of the people.

No, this is not just British exceptionalism; rather, it is the British variant of an all-European and in some respects all-western phenomenon. Vote Leave campaigners repeated their slogan “take back control” more often than Daleks metallically intone ‘exterminate’ – but that’s because it was deadly effective. “Take back control” is the cry of Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, the nationalist Law and Justice party in Poland – and Donald Trump. This is trumpery European-style.

For me, as a lifelong English European, this is the biggest defeat of my political life. It feels almost as bad a day as the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall was good. I believe it will spell the end of the United Kingdom. A majority of the English and Welsh carried Scotland out of a European community in which most Scots clearly wish to remain. No one should be surprised if Scotland now votes to achieve independence inside the European Union. This result will threaten hard-won peace and progress in Ireland. What will happen to that 300-mile open frontier between the Republic and Northern Ireland?

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My own homeland, England, is revealed as a house divided against itself: London and the rest, rich and poor, young and old. (Some 75% of those under 25 voted for remain.) This was Black Friday for one half of England, Independence Day for the other half. We will pay the economic price for years to come. The costs will probably fall especially hard on the less well-off English who voted for Brexit. Now we have a fight on our hands to ensure that England – this land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land – does not become a meaner, darker, smaller-spirited place.

Yet even worse may be the impact on Europe. “This is not a crisis for the European Union,” Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, reassured us on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. What ludicrous complacency. This is a massive crisis for the EU, one of the largest in its history. Le Pen, who is currently setting the agenda of French politics, tweeted “victory for freedom” and called for a French referendum. Geert Wilders demanded a Dutch one, while the leader of Italy’s Northern League added: “Now it’s our turn.” Embracing Nigel Farage, they hail a “patriotic spring”. Poll after poll shows between a third and a half of the population in many European countries sharing a “British” mistrust of the EU. If we don’t learn the lessons of this rebuff, 23 June 2016 could be the beginning of the end of the European Union.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Europe’s highs and lows … the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Photograph: Tom Stoddart Archive/Getty

Vladimir Putin will be rubbing his hands in glee. The unhappy English have delivered a body blow to the west, and to the ideals of international cooperation, liberal order and open societies to which England has in the past contributed so much.

“To be defeated and not give up, that is victory,” said Poland’s interwar independence hero Józef Piłsudski. “To be victorious and rest on your laurels, that is defeat.” We English Europeans must acknowledge that we have suffered a defeat, but we will not give up. After all, 48% of the people who voted in this referendum were with us.

Acres of newsprint and gigabytes of web space will be devoted over the next weeks and months to the grim mechanics of disentangling the UK from the EU. As all the experts derided by the Brexiteers pointed out, this will be long, complicated and painful. For now, I have more personal reflections.

As an English European I see two tasks before us, which stand in a certain tension with each other. On the one hand, now the people’s decision has been made, we must do everything we can to limit the damage to this country. And if it turns out that “this country” is to be without Scotland, then let England be the one of Charles Dickens and George Orwell, not that of Nigel Farage and Nick Griffin. Since we have predicted, in entirely good faith, that the consequences of Brexit will be disastrous, this means we have to work to prove ourselves wrong. I would be so happy if we were proved wrong.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A great English European … Winston Churchill. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

As Europeans, on the other hand, we must do everything we can to ensure the European Union learns the lessons of this stinging reverse, which has its origins as much in recent European as in earlier British history. For if the EU and the eurozone do not change, they will be engulfed too, by a thousand continental versions of Farage. And with all its faults, the union is still worth saving. I stand by my adaptation of that great English European Winston Churchill’s famous remark on democracy: this is the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time.

But, and here’s the tension, what is best for Britain may not be best for the rest of the EU, and vice versa. For if the Brexiteers were to be proved right in their blithe promises that Britain can have all the economic advantages of EU membership with none of the disadvantages – full access to the single market without free movement of people, and so on – then their French, Dutch and Danish counterparts will surely cry: “I want what they are having.” After all, who would not like to have their cake and eat it? So there is a distinct political logic in making Brexit visibly painful for the UK, pour encourager les autres. I would be very surprised indeed if some of our French and other partners did not follow this logic. Indeed, I hear they are saying already that Britain must complete its two-year exit negotiation before they will even begin to talk about the trade and investment relationship that follows.

So the two souls in my breast, the English and European, may now be brought into conflict with each other. Of course, legally speaking, since you are only an EU citizen by virtue of being a citizen of a member state, I, along with all other Brits – or at least, if the Scots skedaddle, the English, Welsh and Northern Irish – will cease to be what is loosely called a “European citizen” in 2018 or 2019, when the exit negotiation is complete. But just as Britain will always remain a European country, so I will, come what may, remain a European.

Among the many messages I have received from continental friends, one particularly moves me. It is from a French intellectual and reads: “Ce n’est qu’un au revoir, mes frères / Ce n’est qu’un au revoir”, this being the French version of Auld Lang Syne. Underneath he has written simply: “We do love England.”