Goodbye Europe

My website is called World Hangover. After today’s referendum, thanks to over half of the UK’s votes, the world just got a lot smaller, and a lot darker.

I was planning to move to Berlin this year. Goodbye, Berlin. I was intending to spend the rest of my twenties touring Europe, working and having new experiences and meeting new people. Goodbye, dreams. 27 countries are now off limits, no more right to work, or right to live. A generation that spent their youth holidaying at Skegness have made damn sure that the next one will do the same. Goodbye, cheap airfare. Any extended travelling in exotic countries will now be much more difficult as the pound crashes. Goodbye, exchange rate. Fear, toxic fear spread by the press, has led to this. The drawbridge has been raised. With some vague notion of reducing immigration, without even a rough plan produced, or any indication that we actually could reduce immigration, we’ve barricaded ourselves in and cut off the world that I so badly want to explore. Goodbye, future.

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It’s not hard to see where the xenophobia in the UK stems from.

One of my favourite songs is David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, about lovers separated in East and West Berlin. I went to Germany in May, and I saw the Berlin Wall. It’s just a large concrete structure, completely unremarkable, but the division and the oppression it represented made my heart ache. In 1987, Bowie sang ‘Heroes’ by the Wall to a crowd of West Berliners. The music could be heard throughout the city. Crowds gathered to hear the singing beyond the Wall in East Berlin. The performance is said to be one of the turning points in bringing down the Wall, for the great triumph of humanity over regimes seeking to keep us apart. My hairs stood on end thinking of the overwhelming compassion and the incredibly human need for togetherness that brought it down.

Somehow, today feels like the opposite. I’m glad Bowie isn’t alive to see this. I’ve never been so ashamed to be British.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgcc5V9Hu3g

2 thoughts on “Goodbye Europe

  1. You are an idiot.
    I visited Poland and Lithuania with visas before the EU Schengen agreement with Poland, and Lithuania about 14 months after independence. I have been to the USA working, and lived in Germany during the “halcyon days” you seem to be after. Ever tried claiming your “rights” as an EU citizen in the happy clappy Benneton world you describe? No, thought not. It never existed. It was always us doing it by the rules and everyone else saying”fuck you you’re foreign”. I was in Berlin months after the wall fell, and let me tell you that working in Germany in the east, many of them wanted it back up again. Yes the poor shits in Scunthorpe and Sunderland don’t give a fucking shit about you, Tarquin and Jacinta and you bloody gap year in Tuscany, or Mummy and Daddy’s house in Provence, they are too busy trying to survive in a shit environment where no-one cares. They still don’t care. If you want to do these things in life – you don’t need a pisshead authoritarian ex-Hitler youth member to tell you that it’s possible, or not, you do it anyway. Boo fucking hoo, the EU were taking the piss, and still are, I should know I was working for them. They despise us, the French because the capitulated in WW2 and the fourth republic collapsed because they went full retard about their colonies, The Germans with a hand wringing sense of self loathing and self pity for their lack of self control and unleashing death on a scale never seen before in history. Collective guilt is not, and never should be the foundation of any society. Don’t get me started on “immigration”. Frau Merkel, what an idiot, handing the Bundestag to the far right on a plate. this shit ain’t been seen since 1944, well done!

    Yes you need to see the world, that way your brainwashed idiot millenial viewpoint might start to fray at the edges when some life experience starts to happen in your sheltered little life, and believe me – from the drivel I just read, you need to get out there very soon.

    Ashamed to be British? – yes I am ashamed you are British too.

    PS I believe Bowie lived quite happily in Berlin for quite some time well before the EU, when it was what we voted to join, the EEC, a trading bloc that Heath lied to us about to get us in. DeGaulle was right. we never should have gone in in the first place.

    I repeat – you are an idiot – so educate yourself.

    • hello sir or madame, thank you for commenting on my blog at christmas time with such fury, you seem a very mentally stable person. i wrote that article two years ago and yes, i have travelled the world quite a bit since then! I even spent 16 months working in Berlin, good heavens! I certainly had an adventure or two and met some interesting people. it seems the vast majority of my beliefs and opinions still hold up today as they did then – who knew?

      its quite strange actually – hateful, frothing comments like your own used to upset me, but i find it quite funny now. i mean, you certainly know your history – cool! however, my friend, if you are ever seeking to change anybodys opinion, maybe dont start your enlightened rant with the phrase ‘you are an idiot’. hurling such an insult at strangers on the internet is, i feel, the equivalent of screaming and going red-faced in the middle of a calm debate over a coffee – it makes you look just a tad unhinged.

      so, to recap: you have spent a great deal of your time and effort type a breathtakingly long comment on my personal blog, called me an idiot without seeking to actually have a discussion, and you have gained absolutely nothing from doing so apart from giving me a jolly good chuckle. well done to you, strange man or woman from the internet. well done indeed.

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