Got out of UK a few months before Brexit as very sadly could see the writing on the wall.
Came to France, did a Masters for basically free, got a stable job with decent holidays (although, admittedly, not so decent pay) and was able to buy a house with a low, fixed interest rate for 20 years. Wouldn’t have been able to do that in the UK.
So I’m very grateful, and a little smug too sometimes. Watching from this side of the channel it’s really tragic seeing what has happened to the UK. But there are things that give me hope and I feel like a turnaround is just starting. And you never know what might happen in France!
I feel very sorry for my niece and nephews who have no hope now of every buying their own homes even with good salaries, they will never get up enough of a deposit to put down which has got ridiculous and most people could never save enough through the whole of their working lives, never going out or having any life at all. At least France dosn’t ask you to put down a stupid deposit for a house. I am also very sad at how brexit has split families down the middle, mine hardly talk to me and mine over here, they are just so bigotted its horrible considering they were never like it before being poisoned by the likes of Far**e,Smog,Jobo etc and their lies.
I totally understand why families can fall out over Brexit.
The leavers took no notice of what would happen to their family members living in Europe. They totally sold them out.
Maybe they are now realising what a load of liars supported Brexit now that the UK’s economic situation is down 4% due to leaving the EU?
Somehow C&Rs was so much more worthwhile if you’re going to have a fight with rellies - so much more at stake in that particular scrap. Brexit just seems petty in comparison.
It brought out all the nasty racist views some of them have harboured for years, mostly by brainwashing about being invaded. I know several other people living in the EU who had the same problem with UK based family members and their complete refusal to listen to any sane discussion over brexit and its pros and cons.
But it wasn’t just at national level. For many of us it had a direct personal effect on our lives and relationships plus it often exposed some really quite unpleasant points of view from those we thought were good friends and colleagues.
Personally, after the vote, my wife became the subject of some quite unpleasant remarks on the basis of her nationality, something that had never happened before, at least not openly.
I’m certainly sad to hear that people behaved that way. My expectation is that if people behaved like this then it was probably already a part of who they were, and Brexit just enabled it to become obvious.
at least in my case, my eldest brother and his son’s families who were quite vociferous in favour of Brexit have now quietened down since the so called “project fear” has actually materialised
You don’t know the half of it ! When I was at school as second generation immigrant the racist remarks were everyday my children as third generation were treated like shit by people who should know better.Recently my sister second generation immigrant was asked when she was going back home my sister is 71 born and lived in the UK all her life. I have multiple stories about racism in the UK.
I am sorry to hear the abuse you and your family have suffered. I grew up in a very multicultural town and went to both primary and secondary school with others from West Indian cultures and Asian cultures and to be honest, being racist never came up because we accepted those with browner skins or different facial features plus anyone who called names was swiftly punished by the schools. My children’s godparents are from the Windies, my old neighbours in the UK were Pakistan origins and other local families from China,India and Kashmir all got on together. Media has a lot to answer for in stirring up racial biggotry and hatred.
A similar thing happened to my (Luxembourg!) wife. In the local gym changing room, the week after the referendum, one of the ladies getting changed said to everybody (paraphrasing) “isn’t it wonderful, all those foreigners are going to have to leave”. My wife said 'do you mean people like me? Cue embarrassed silence followed by profuse ‘explanations’ along the lines of ‘no,“obviously” not you, but we mean the foreign looking/sounding ones’ etc etc. We later left the UK for France for the many, many positive attractions here, but there was certainly some element of wishing to leave the UK in its post Brexit state.
I think that maybe Brexit was the culmination, not the cause. UKIP rhetoric had really opened Pandora’s box some time before. That a party and philosophies like theirs was given traction at all implies it, and by that I mean racism, was being sown in fertile ground.
Etiquette and social sensitivities had always kept a lid on what was said publicly. UKIP made it OK to say horrid things out loud by leading example. Repeatedly. Passive agression became plain agression. I’m not sure we can blame the media for instigating racism. They just pander to what the public wants in order to sell more papers and garner more support.
Not all Leave supporters were xenophobes. Presumably, there were other reasons for isolationism. It was just that the ground work of distrust and suspicion laid by UKIP tipped the Brexit vote balance.
IIRC, your old constituency was Witham, Essex which of course famously has Priti Patel as the local MP… I wonder if those people in the gym thought about her when they spouted off their racist tripe
Don’t be sorry just call it out when you see it or hear it
My situation happend and still continues to happen to white eastern european families in the UK and elsewhere in western europe if the truth be told.
Yes, unfortunately I have seen this sort of thing regularly from my childhood onwards. Not against me, but against people that I know and care about. I never understood it myself. People can be very cruel for no apparent reason.
I often wonder if it’s a manifestation of the dominant culture’s ‘island mentality’. The English sometimes refer to ‘the Scottish borders’; perhaps it’s in the plural because the border has shifted backwards and forwards so many times, that even centuries after the Act of Union, people from that formerly littoral region often refer to themselves as being from ‘the Borders’ rather than being ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’.
In the 1990’s art world, so-called ‘border culture’ was a popular curatorial catch phrase, and one had ‘border’ or ‘littoral’ artists who lived and worked in the ‘hybridised inter-stitial space’ between two neighbouring, well-defined cultures. Today much of that seems to have fallen away as political discourse becomes increasingly characterised by simplistic polarising binary oppositions.
