Pot Noodle Britain

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What was Brexit like? America’s declaration of independence? A man leaving a golf club but demanding to still be allowed into the bar? Over the years, I went through a few analogies, but the one that persisted was of a married man who has for years enjoyed casually flirting with a work colleague. One evening he makes his traditional half-hearted pass, and instead of rolling her eyes, she replies: “Go on, then”. A month later, he’s living out of his car and negotiating through lawyers to see his children one weekend a month, and he can’t really tell you how it happened.
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A revisitation, afore ye go, from the Spirit of Brexit Past, journalist Robert Hutton.

 
Ah, but at least the Brexiteers of the Red Wall won’t have to put up with all those Polish immigrants with their little knitted caps and women covered in black.
 
Obviously, it’s not a good thing to think of Leave voters as stupid, at least uniquely stupid, but very many of them seem really centred on their resentment of other people being so great that harming them is of prime importance, despite the fact that the people most harmed will be themselves.
 
Apart from those whose grandparents snuck over here in their (literally) thousands to live off the welfare state, no doubt, while flying fighters in the Battle of Britain.
 
There were several kinds of Leave voters, obviously, but the establishment of the Second World War as the most sacred event in human history, to be ceaselessly celebrated through documentaries, comedies and films played a great part.
 
I think it’s dangerous to begin to experience Schadenfreude when we see the present-day struggles of countries that have done bad things in the past. Consider Hungary, for example, which is currently in a bit of a pickle. I’d be loath to suggest that this is their comeuppance for being Germany’s allies in two world wars, murdering 400,000 Jews, and subjecting most of their neighbours to hundreds of years of oppression. Or Russia, also currently not in the best of shape. I’d not like to think of that as payback for the annexation of the Baltic states, the partitions of Poland, the Katyń massacre, the mass rape of German women, and countless pogroms against the Jews.

I have a friend who is Hungarian, and it’s astonishing the number of nationalities and ethnicities that she feels obliged to hate: Jews, gypsies, Austrians, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Russians, Bulgarians, Turks, Britons, Americans, probably others I can’t think of right now. It makes me think that we would all be a lot better off if we gave up harbouring resentments for things that people’s ancestors did in the past.
 
Is nationalism a problem among the young in the UK or just older folks?

Just curious.

I have a few British friends and they are universally opposed to Brexit.
 
EmilyAlexandra said:
I have a friend who is Hungarian, and it’s astonishing the number of nationalities and ethnicities that she feels obliged to hate:
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Possibly a function of the fact that nobody else has the faintest idea of what Hungarians are talking about? 🙂
 
Feanor2 said:
Is nationalism a problem among the young in the UK or just older folks?
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If viewed through the Brexit lens, polls suggest the younger the less infected by nationalism. But nationalism is a disease throughout the world, I suggest. The British version is made more pitiful by loss of empire and loss of power.

Wrecking your economy and worsening national influence in the name of patriotism may perhaps be Britain’s especial contribution to the genus, however.
 
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Indeed, like many ‘indigenous’ Brexiteers wanting to stop East Europeans turning up because they disliked tanned people while many BAME voters voted for Brexit because they wanted to reduce East European immigration so that they could bring more of their families here.
 
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That’s true, of course, as to the detail. And the same goes for the reverse. I would not claim to be knowledgable about conditions on the southern border of the United States, and I’m all for security of borders, but I can smell racial prejudice across 5000 miles of ocean.

Similarly.
 
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