Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? Sun 28th April 2019
Anyone
who came to the Chipping
Norton Theatre
on Sunday afternoon expecting a debate would have certainly been disappointed,
as the four panelists on stage were all clear and outspoken Remainers. Still,
they would also have been unreasonable in their expectations, since the event
was always billed as a space for discussion about how to proceed with efforts
towards remaining. Indeed, the very poster for the event featured a yellow star
proclaiming ‘for people who still believe in experts’. Host Ian Hunt did make
efforts at the outset to indicate that there would be space and time for
questions at the end of the hour, stating that ‘any Leavers in the audience
will be welcome to ask questions’, which indeed they did.
Naturally,
given the disposition of the event, the majority of the audience were indeed Remainers, and the guests were an interesting selection, including comedian
Mitch Benn, author and palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke, and co-founder of
‘Our Future, Our Choice’, a youth campaign for a People’s Vote, Femi Oluwole.
Much was discussed during the hour, with an emphasis on where we go from here,
on concerns over Labour’s stance on a second referendum, and of course,
courtesy of Dr Clarke, on the negative impacts already seen due to the Brexit
vote in the NHS.
What
emerged for me as the major theme from the afternoon was the sense that it is
extremely hard to try to unify the country in the wake of this most polarizing
of all political events, the Brexit vote. Concerns over the actions which may come
from right wing extremists if Brexit does not take place were presented as
misleading, as Benn indicated: you don’t appease extremists or fascists by
giving them what they want. This simply gives them strength.
Both
Benn and Oluwole were very strong on decrying the notion that Remainers are
condemning Brexit Leave voters as racist in their thoughts or motivations,
furthermore complaining that when the figureheads of the Leave campaign such as
Farage are condemned as racist, they tend to turn this around to fuel further
division by suggesting that such a criticism is levied at the whole 17.4
million souls who voted Leave.
Indeed,
at the end of the debate, the very balanced and reasonable Dr Clarke was
vocally accused by a Leave supporter in the audience as having ‘implied’ that
Leave supporters are racists. In actuality she did nothing of the sort, what
she did reference in her discourse is that the outcome of the vote seems to
have encouraged existing racists and those with anti-immigrant sentiments to
come out of the woodwork, describing an event the very day after the result of
the 2016 vote was announced, in which two young men verbally abused a Polish
doctor in the hospital in which she was working at the time. She was attempting
to indicate that the NHS has been steadily losing staff, particularly nurses,
in the wake of the vote’s outcome, and that this pressure on the NHS is only
going to increase if Brexit does indeed take place. She was not tarnishing
Leave voters with this brush, and claiming them as racist, but she was
indicating that the vote itself and its outcome has brought racists out into
the light, and further polarized society, which it clearly has.
The
eloquent Oluwole took pains to indicate that much of the motivation behind
Leave votes was the underdeveloped and underinvested parts of the United Kingdom which need better support and
growth, and focused on this as part of the solution for social cohesion in the UK. As he
mentioned, Brussels actually has a pretty good
track record when it comes to programmes for regional investment, it’s Westminster who have let
the country down on that front. Explorations of how we can reunite a divided
nation took this event beyond simply preaching to the converted and turned it
into something more productive, and more hopeful.
