Aiming for the foot

I'm (just about) old enough to re­mem­ber a pre-UE time when a flight from Lon­don to, say, Barcelona on even the crum­mi­est air­line (Dan-Air) cost a tidy sum that most of us didn't have. Trav­el­ling across Eu­rope by train on the then much vaunted In­terail cards in­volved being ripped off by bu­reau de change of­fices every time you bumped into a bor­der. I knew sev­eral Cata­lan and Span­ish res­i­dents in the UK who had to renew their res­i­dence visas every six months or re­ceive a fort­night's ul­ti­ma­tum to leave. Work per­mits were harder to ob­tain, thus en­abling the man­ager of even the hum­blest Wimpy Bar to de­mand a car­nal en­trance fee to his es­tab­lish­ment from vul­ner­a­ble fe­male il­le­gals (I was per­son­ally told this by a Pole who, des­per­ate, took up this 'offer', after which she was al­lowed to work end­less hours for a fi­nite pit­tance). Years on, the EU's free­dom of move­ment has meant that such per­mits and visas (and em­ploy­ers' sex­ual black­mail­ing, for that mat­ter) are a thing of the past for mem­ber cit­i­zens. And the EU's open mar­ket hap­pily gave rise to dozens of low-cost air­lines (al­though the stock of the British ones is now plum­met­ing, caus­ing prices to rise). And the sin­gle cur­rency shut down the bu­reau de change racket just about every­where (the UK ex­cepted). This is not to say that the UE is God's gift to supra­na­tional bu­reau­cra­cies: its com­mis­sion­ers are un­elected (like the next British PM, cho­sen this month), its par­lia­ment is lit­tle more than a de­bat­ing cham­ber, its edicts are some­times ir­ri­tat­ingly per­nick­ety and its re­sponse to close-at-hand cat­a­stro­phes like Bosn­ian wars and Syr­ian refugees, cal­lously cack-handed. A sec­tor of pro-Brexit vot­ers bran­dished all this as their main rea­son for wish­ing to leave, omit­ting to men­tion – even as their lead­ers slipped away, plan­less, into the wings - that every time the UK has ne­go­ti­ated with the EU, it has never been to im­prove it in any way, but sim­ply to grab more ad­van­tages for the self-same UK. An­other sec­tor, after years of anti-im­mi­gra­tion groom­ing from an out­size slice of the British press, has been given to un­der­stand that with Brexit they would be rid not only of EU res­i­dents but also Black and Asian Eng­lish peo­ple. The re­sult has been the most vomit-stim­u­lat­ing out­break of big­otry since Os­wald Mosley's hey­day. But I'm not one of the sore losers who the win­ning 52% keep taunt­ing. In fact, I couldn't vote at all, thanks to a 2002 law which dis­en­fran­chises any UK pass­port holder who's lived out of the coun­try for more than 15 years (why 15? Why not 47? Or 12 and three quar­ters?). The point is, with Brexit, every­body has lost, not just the 48% who voted to stay in. Even the xeno­phobes' now smirk­ing faces will fall when they dis­cover that the Poles etc. are not about to leave in a hurry or in­deed at all (their right to stay will be guar­an­teed, even if only to en­sure that of British res­i­dents abroad). And the nu­mer­ous el­derly pro-Brexit vot­ers, for in­stance, will not be see­ing, as they were given to be­lieve, any eco­nomic im­prove­ments within what's left of their life­times (quite the op­po­site). And those pa­tri­otic Leavers who sim­ply wanted Britain to be Great again may well find them­selves cling­ing to a state called Eng­land and Wales which would enjoy a slightly lower in­ter­na­tional sta­tus to that of, say, Scot­land. Like the song says: 'There's no suc­cess like fail­ure, and fail­ure's no suc­cess at all.' And there was I, think­ing every­one knew the lyrics.