At least you can leave

London is the city of leaving do’s. There’s a real push on to get out before it all gets worse. This morning I was chatting with a Swedish friend who leaves on Tuesday, telling her how much freer and more energetic she’ll feel once she’s not carrying around the mental load of daily FUD that comes from just living here, now. My friend cut across the faux cheery bullshit and said “I don’t feel safe here, any more. There’s no limit to what they can do.”

There’s a conversation I’ve had with several British friends. We’ll all be moaning about Brexit affecting us and how the UK’s dysfunctional politics means there is no way to express this electorally, and then they’ll say; “But you’re lucky. At least you can leave.”

I go back and forward on that one. For British friends, living here is a one-shot deal. If Britain leaves the EU, they’re locked in on an island with people who say they’d rather starve than share air with immigrants like me, and who’d rather “send back” anyone brown-skinned. The festival of racism declared officially open by the referendum will go on travelling from town to town, finding new people to give shit-kickings to. Being British and liberal or on the left is painful, with Brexit in sight. The country’s remaining public services will probably fail and its already punitive social safety net be gathered up in the vicious, weakened hand of the state to be used solely as a whip.

If you’re British and can’t rustle up an Irish or Italian granny, you’re trapped however bad it gets. (Actually, you can still move to Ireland, as long as the hodge podge of reciprocity that goes with the Common Travel Area and Government of Ireland Act survives.) And your children, herded into forcibly privatised academies and made to rote-learn and silently face the wall for hours on end, all the better to prepare them for work in the Amazon warehouse – well they can forget about even dreaming of learning or living abroad. So yes, you have lost much, more than most of us yet know. And you worry as much as we do about martial law and what to do if the insulin runs out, but you’re not afraid, not like my Swedish friend is.

You’re not going to find your work contract isn’t being renewed because your employer “can’t take the chance” that you won’t be permitted to work here after Brexit. You won’t be turned away from viewing a basement flat because you’re foreign and the landlord “doesn’t want to risk it”. You won’t be sent away from the pre-natal clinic or refused chemotherapy unless you can document that you’re entitled to treatment, however much tax you’ve paid. You won’t be threatened with credible violence for speaking English in a foreign accent on public transport. You won’t refuse hot soup or a hostel bed when it’s below zero because you believe, correctly, that local authorities will tell the police or immigration enforcement where to find you so you can be deported. You won’t hesitate about reporting rape or domestic violence for the same reason.

These are just the real-life experiences of other EU citizens in the UK at the moment. If these examples seem unlikely to you, then widen your reading or your circle of acquaintance. The experiences of non-EU immigrants are far, far worse.

This week’s Immigration Bill, voted through easily as Labour flopped around between abstaining and then at the last minute only weakly whipping votes, worsens the conditions of all immigrants while pretending to equalise their mistreatment. From April 1, if Europeans don’t earn over £30,000 (more than many public service key-workers), they aren’t welcome. From April 1, our legal status will match our current cultural status as fully taxed and legally liable non-citizens tolerated – barely – as long as we earn 15-20% more than the average worker.

I wrote before about how, when a country thinks it’s being clever by weighing and measuring people by their current market value, it’s being a) economically illiterate and b) squandering the good will every relationship relies on. But I have to admit I also find it galling to be looked down on by a political class whose privilege is so iron-clad and life experience so narrow that they’ve never worked outside the single, uniform architectural style of their private school, university and parliament. The places they move through as they move through life merge into one single neo-Gothic space where it always smells of polished wood and where arcane customs make People not Like Us feel foolish and illegitimate.

Britain’s leaders hated the EU not because of “sovereignty” but because it’s not designed to make them feel special. There is no woolsack in Brussels and Strasbourg. There is no cavalry. The constitution is something you just pull down from the shelf and read. Britain’s leaders despise international institutions because in those spaces they’re a generic Minister for Justice or Head of Government among many, not The Home Secretary, not The Prime Minister. They can’t bear to feel generic and interchangeable, distinguished only by their knowledge and ability, hamstrung by their limited language skills. They joke that appointing someone to be a European Commissioner – several of whom have spending power greater than whole governments – is just how you get rid of troublesome politicians. They complain about the lack of ‘magic’ and ‘history’ in the European institutions to mask their anxiety and anger at still being expected to produce good work outside of the ultimate English cradle to grave comfort zone. They are the ultimate snowflakes. They wouldn’t last half an hour as an immigrant anywhere. A n y w h e r e. And “they” can often include the Labour front bench, too.

So yes, I feel terrible for British friends who appear to be stuck with these mediocrities. They must feel powerless, albeit not as powerless as the European citizens living here, paying taxes and subject to laws they don’t even have the symbolic, FPTP-fixed right to vote on.

But at least I can leave. And I’m Irish, so I have more rights than other Europeans, at least for now. Maybe it is hypothetically better for EU27 people in the UK because they can leave, but I want to get it down here in writing that having their citizenship stolen in a vote they were barred from participating in, having to apply to continue living in the life they built without local knowledge or networks, being administratively plucked out of that life and placed in the maw of the “hostile environment”, dealing day to day with xenophobia that can flick from mere verbal abuse to violence at any moment, and knowing in their bones that their future ability to access healthcare, education, pensions and social welfare is going to be whittled away until it is nothing; these are objectively worsening their material conditions of life. The hypothetical ability to leave does not mitigate this worsening, especially for those locked in here with British partners or children.

I don’t say this when I’m told that at least I can leave, because I think everyone’s pain under the yoke of Brexit is significant, and pain that comes from different causes – some metaphysical, some legal/administrative and cultural – can hurt to the same degree, even if in different quality. And also; divide and conquer is awful and is the problem, not the solution. And also; if you want to see how sociopathic UK politics is, witness its utter indifference to the material worsening of the conditions of British people living in other EU states, caused by Brexit. It’s not that they don’t care about us. They just don’t care, full stop.

There is of course another dimension to this; the vile, ignorant and arrogant way UK politicians have allowed Brexit to harm its nearest neighbour and erstwhile closest ally in Brussels, Ireland. I’m not going to catalogue it all. Fintan O’Toole diagnoses it quite well. A friend of some of us at CT, Dearbhail McDonald, writes in today’s Guardian about what the backstop really means to Northern Ireland. And the heretofore hard-right Tory talking point of ‘why don’t you just “re-join” the UK and make our border problem disappear for us please’ is now, apparently, a reasonable question for a flagship news programme to put to the minister of a sovereign state. It isn’t polite, or perhaps even possible, to express how angry this makes me, as an Irish person who lives in the UK.

One anecdote, though. Last summer I went to the official Irish twentieth anniversary celebration of the Good Friday / Belfast Agreement. It was held in the Barbican in London and featured a programme of poetry, images and music commemorating the Troubles and marking the losses that were to some small extent redeemed by the peace. At the drinks afterward I peered around the room and asked the British friend whose plus one I was – and who knew pretty much everyone there – where the UK government reps were. Not here, came the answer. They were invited but they hadn’t come.

The UK government snubbed the whole anniversary, not just that event. In fact, a few weeks before the anniversary, some British embassies around the world – prompted by questions from their host countries about what they’d be doing to mark the GFA – got in on last-minute celebrations with local Irish embassies. No shade on them, they belatedly made the effort and I’m sure it was appreciated. But for Official UK the GFA was to be ignored lest it highlight the reckless chances the government was taking with peace. (It was ignored also because the government’s majority is propped up by the biggest political party in Northern Ireland to have rejected the peace process, and also because Tories hate it as British sovereignty is the only sovereignty in the world that doesn’t stink.)

So when, as happened a couple of weeks ago drinking tea in the house of a dear friend who broke off from our mutual complaints about Britain’s current dysfunction to say, not for the first time, “At least you can leave”, I tend to say something like; ‘On top of our fears for our legal situation here as Europeans, it’s hard to imagine the hurt and anger of Irish people about how the UK is treating our country and its fragile peace, but please know that these feelings are considerable’.

I don’t say ‘I know you feel bad but your country is shitting all over mine and we didn’t vote for ANY of this and your media is full of racist xenophobic crap about my people that I thought you all grew out of in the late nineties already and you only occasionally get called a saboteur whereas I am a dirty economic migrant every day of the finite number of days I have to be alive that I am squandering in this hostile land but I don’t want us to fight about this because I love you and also most of my European friends are leaving or have already left’, because while this is something I feel, it’s not all of it.

I think about leaving all the time. But there are two of us and one of us has a salaried job here (working on Brexit, of all things. Oh Life’s Irony, you are such a melodramatic asshole.) We have a house we probably couldn’t sell, now, and anyway, sterling is worth so little elsewhere. And though I’m clearly no longer considered part of Team UK, I’m still part of the conversation, in a small way. Emotionally, intellectually and culturally, I’ve invested a lot, here. But I think about leaving all the time. All. The. Fucking. Time. I went away for a few days last week and coming back here and reading the news felt like taking a yoke chained to a rock and placing it on my shoulders and walking up a hill not because I wanted to get to the top but because the hill was the only thing there was.

I think about the freedom from the mental Brexit load I would have elsewhere, from the psychological Brexit tax. I wonder about other countries with functional progressive agendas I could be part of, minus the political antipattern of this toxic mess, and, hey, nicer weather. I dream about living somewhere with a workable health system that could look after a bunch of issues that hold me back, day to day. I imagine living somewhere actively pleasant where I’d invite my parents to spend each January, the generosity of the climate adding years to all our lives, the lessening of the grey-faced hustle that characterises the southeast of England opening up time and leisure to share all those conversations I’ll probably regret never having.

But I’ve moved countries at least a half a dozen times already and I know what it takes. I want to write books now, and country-moves are to all writers what babies are to women-writers; they cost you a couple of years and a shit-ton of money and about one book each.

At least I can leave. At least I can leave. They say Lisbon’s the new Berlin, right? Maybe staying’s the new leaving.