Lewis Pek Editor
Comment July 2016
So Britain decides to leave the EU... how fantastic is that? We’ve finally said goodbye to our biggest global trading partner, to blissful visa-free travel and countless free trade agreements in place since 1973. Brilliant. So glad I didn’t change my dollars and euros after my last trips...
I can’t say that I’m surprised. I’m in shock - but not surprised. Talk to the average Brit and Europe means little more than over-bearing bureaucracy and rampant immigration. While the British like to mock America for its lack of passport carrying citizens, the vast majority of people leave the UK to find either a beach or a European city for a stag/hen party, usually to disgrace ourselves either way.
Having travelled to six European countries in the last six months - a pretty light travel schedule compared to most gaming executive diaries, it’s given me the chance to compare and contrast the views both in and outside the UK, hopping from one foot into Europe and back out again.
Back home, the conversations in playgrounds, pubs, changing rooms, bars and restaurants, all centred around the state of immigration, the lack of self-determination, and what has the EU done for us? It’s been both frustrating and increasingly alarming. The message to leave was so simple; the reasons to stay so complicated and meaningless for the vast majority of UK people.
IT’S BEEN FRUSTRATING AND ALARMING. THE MESSAGE TO LEAVE WAS SO SIMPLE, THE REASONS TO STAY SO COMPLICATED
Discussing Brexit in Europe, there was much sympathy with the views of the disaffected, but disbelief that the UK could self-harm to such a degree. I used to feel smug about my connection with Europe, listening to the mums in the playground and friends over a pint - dislocated by lack of involvement in business, trade or engagement with people and the cultures they’d mostly likely never see. I thought I was the one in splendid isolation, privileged by my connection to Europe.
However, when you’ve just returned from Europe, where G3 conducts over 50 per cent of our business, and learn you’d not be listening hard enough to really appreciate the bunch of jingoistic, egoistic xenophobes you knew your countrymen to be; it’s bitterly ironic that my personal elitism, to have never learned a second language, leaves me stranded on a rock with the rest of these little islanders.
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