Understanding Why Britain left the European Union

For many of us, who don’t live in Europe, it might seem a shoulder shrug.  But when I bring it down to an easy kind of experience, it kind of makes sense.

I want you to imagine being at your school when you were a kid and belonging to a club.  It could be a Chess Club, an Art Club, any kind of club which was ‘always’ there and ‘always’ ran a certain way.

A new teacher comes and combines some clubs; so that it isn’t the Chess Club any more, it’s the ‘Games Club’ or it isn’t ‘Art’ but “Art, Music and Dance.”

You go to a meeting and it isn’t the same.   Chess is in that corner and everyone is talking about Backgammon over there and Parcheesi over here, and people want to bring in computer games.

You are not interested in that, you want to play Chess.  However, there is only one table for Chess and two people are already playing, so you have to stand up and watch.

Instead of five tables, as it used to be, so that ten people can play at the same time, four tables are given over to other games.

Suppose you belonged to the Art Club and were deep into working with charcoal.  But right now someone is singing and you are supposed to join in.  After the singing they are going to teach you a dance.

You want to draw, but you can’t because all the tables have been pushed aside to make room for the entertainment.

You start to get fed up.

Fed up because other rules and ideas and things you are not interested or involved in are being pushed down your throat and you don’t feel it is a good idea to have combined the groups.

I give you these images, because it is so easy to recall something like this happening to you as a child, and how you felt.

England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, however you want to call the British Isles, are separated from Europe and have been for about eight thousand years.

Yes, there is a population which, way back then, had walked across from France, then were stranded when the flooding took place and created the English Channel.

However, there have also been incursions by those ‘Vikings’ as we call them, from Scandinavia.

England had its own political system, it’s own culture, its own ideas.  As time passed the separation became greater.  Language is the first obvious separation as is the developing culture.

There was a time that the English virtually ‘ruled the world’.   They not only had colonies in the ‘New World’ from Canada to America, to islands in the Caribbean to Belize in Central America to Guyana in South America, to Africa, where they had Ghana and Nigeria, parts of South Africa, East Africa, India, islands in the Pacific and Australia and New Zealand.

During the 20th Century the United Kingdom lost its Empire, but maintained its sovereignty in language, culture, and despite having agreements with other countries, maintained its sense of self.

Joining the European Union seemed a bit odd, if one looks at the history of England going back about 1000 years.  In a way, it reminds me of the failed Caribbean Federation.

Way back in the 1950s the idea was that all the British Colonies in the Caribbean, from Trinidad to Barbados, to  St. Lucia, St. Vincent, etc. to Jamaica should be in one kind of United States of the Caribbean.  It might have worked IF…

the Capital was in Kingston, or the leader was Jamaican.

But… the Capital would be in Trinidad and the leader would be from Barbados.

So Jamaica decided, (there were other reasons of course, but these two were anger producers) to leave. And as Eric Williams, of Trinidad said; “One from Ten leaves Naught”  and Federation collapsed.

In England, the idea that Germany has all the power to decide everything, (this isn’t true but people feel it) has chaffed.

The major chaff was immigration.

There is a difference between deciding to accept X numbers of refugees and dispersing them through out the country so that the British culture remains dominant, and having to accept XX number of refugees.

There is a natural xenophobia in all mammals.  When you get a new puppy and already have two or three dogs, you’ve got to work pretty hard for those dogs to accept that outsider puppy.  It is part of the innate survival trait programmed into mammals.   The ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’.

In small doses, xenophobia can be countered.   Slowly integrating, keeping what was, just a bit of adding the ‘new’ .

America is an easy place to see this.

There grew up in America; “China Town”, “Little Italy” , “Little Havana”,  and various neighbourhoods in which the majority were Jews or  African-Americans, etc.   In the neighbourhoods the people lived in their enclaves, but when they left, it was American culture.

People fit themselves in, even if it was just for work, then went home to themselves.

So Chinese New Year is celebrated over here,  Jewish New Year, over there,  etc.

Recently, there has been an anti-Islamic trend due to terrorist activity and the fact many Muslims do not blend but demand that others accommodate them.

For example, in a part of Florida you can’t hang your clothing outside on the line to dry because it offends Muslims.

In England, the idea that they would have to take XX number of refugees caused the push back against the European Union.  This set fire to many annoyances that had been in existence for years.

Whether ‘Brexit’ will prompt other nations to leave, as Jamaica’s departure from Federation provoked its collapse is not certain.   However, it must be a flag that the European Union recognises; don’t push too hard.