The long view

Apart from bald­ness and a bad back, one thing that comes with age is a sense of per­spec­tive. Look­ing back shows us that the life-chang­ing de­ci­sion that kept us from sleep­ing wasn’t such a big deal after all. While the op­po­site can also be true, and we see that if only we hadn’t passed up that fleet­ing op­por­tu­nity we might now be rich and fa­mous.

The same ap­plies to events hap­pen­ing around us, and in those cases some­times not even a life­time is enough to tell whether the event was truly im­por­tant or not. A good ex­am­ple that springs to mind is when in 1972 Chi­nese pre­mier Zhou Enlai was asked about the im­pact of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, which had hap­pened al­most 200 years ear­lier. “Too early to say,” he replied, with Wildean-lke wit.

(As a rather dis­ap­point­ing aside, it turns out that Zhou Enlai was ac­tu­ally re­spond­ing to a ques­tion about the 1968 Paris protests, the ef­fects of which were still being felt a few years later. It ruins the story, and while he may not have been tak­ing a long view of Eu­ro­pean his­tory after all, I think the point still stands.)

I bring this up be­cause I’ve come across a lot of peo­ple these days who ap­pear to know for sure that Brexit is ei­ther a bad thing or a good thing, that the British peo­ple have se­ri­ously messed up by leav­ing the Eu­ro­pean Union or have fi­nally freed them­selves from un­ac­count­able tyranny that was hold­ing the coun­try back. That Brexit, which be­came of­fi­cial at the turn of the year, will have pro­found ef­fects on both the UK and the EU I don’t think is in doubt. What is in doubt is whether it will even­tu­ally turn out to be a good or a bad idea.

Re­cently, I’ve had a num­ber of peo­ple con­fi­dently telling me where Brexit leaves the UK, and most of them are pretty pes­simistic. In fact, one Cata­lan ac­quain­tance seemed to take par­tic­u­lar rel­ish in de­scrib­ing how the British econ­omy is doomed to ruin and how much of the pop­u­la­tion will be thrown into poverty. That’s up­set­ting con­sid­er­ing my fam­ily and friends live there; I ob­vi­ously don’t want to see them tipped out onto the street, al­though I take some com­fort in the fact that no one re­ally knows; it’s just too early to say.

What we do know is what the more mun­dane and im­me­di­ate ef­fects of Brexit will be, from going there to study to con­duct­ing busi­ness, even though there are many de­tails on such things as travel, doc­u­men­ta­tion and trade that still need to be worked out. You can get a taste for some of the new rules and reg­u­la­tions sur­round­ing Cat­alo­nia’s re­la­tion­ship with the UK in our ar­ti­cle on pages 16 and 17.

Mean­while, I look for­ward to a bit of per­spec­tive and, hope­fully, I’ll be able to in­form that ac­quain­tance that my sis­ters haven’t been forced into pros­ti­tu­tion to feed their kids and that my best friend hasn’t had to give up his job as a bar­ris­ter and been re­duced to steal­ing from lor­ries.

As for the French Rev­o­lu­tion, I think enough time has passed for us to call it: things looked bad for France for a while, but it’s ended up as one of the wealth­i­est, most cul­tured and ad­vanced so­ci­eties on the planet. There’s hope for the UK yet.