It was the ten-year anniversary of Brexit last week. That, and we are about to see Prime Minister number seven, since the vote.
I don’t normally write about politics, but I read “Your shit is unreadable” this morning:
Where is the fucking hate? Everyone loves everything. Sunshine, rainbow. You stripped out the ugly parts, thinking it would make you more likeable. It just made you empty.
And it made me want to write something that had been on my mind, but I had been holding off because I don’t want to seem negative.
On June 23, 2016, my fellow countrymen turned up to decide: do you want to be in the European Union, or not?
52% voted to leave.
Only 72% bothered to vote.
On the 24th I woke up in disbelief.
When I think back to that day, it was like I was a cog in a particularly complicated machine, and I had stopped meshing with the rest of the country. The country I call home and I were disconnected on a fundamental level, and I could not understand how.
You could say I was in an ’echo chamber’, hanging around like-minded individuals who only agreed with me. You would be right. I agree with you.
I grew up under a father who was an Electronic Engineer, and a Grandfather who was a Mechanical Engineer in the British Army. Likewise, I am a Software Engineer.
Logic mattered.
Facts mattered.
Everything I had seen led me to believe that we were better off in the EU, and that leaving would be an economic self-sabotage that would be unrivalled in modern times. But the country had decided I was wrong. A utopia was awaiting the United Kingdom outside the EU, and I was just not seeing it.
What followed, in my opinion, has been a decade of stagnation and incompetence, foisted upon us by those that ‘won’. The architects of Brexit are no longer satisfied with leaving the EU, and have moved onto tearing us apart with nationalism; some would say jingoism.
But here we are. A decade later and I still feel like I am not meshing with the country at large.
No street parties heralded the anniversary. No celebrations of all the Brexit benefits we have.
Brexit’s ten-year anniversary came, and went, with barely a mention. Silently into the night; without a whimper.