The unvalidated state

Well, that all went somewhat awry, didn’t it?

I must confess that I was prepared neither for the result of the referendum on Thursday 23rd June nor for its impact on my state of mind. I spent most of Friday, 24th June 2016, in a strangely blank pall of frustration, disbelief, even - briefly - anger, plus an element of intrigue at what the future will bring. Such a complex bubbling brew of emotions will take some time to subside as this weekend peters out into another week, the first of a long, long series of weeks, months and years bringing ructions and repercussions in my homeland along with administrative hurdles and considerations of nationality for me personally.

Questioning our sanity

Did 52% of Britons really, actively, vote to exit the EU? It doesn’t seem that way: the EU was never really the point during the less than savoury referendum campaign. Those who voted for Leave were sold a dream of “reclaiming our sovereignty” without being told why the EU was bad for them personally, nor what would be improved for them personally once Britain left the EU. Did 48% really vote for the EU, or were they simply hoping for the relatively quiet life of being able to travel, work, study, buy and sell within what has become a large and appealingly non-homogeneous patchwork of countries whilst tacitly accepting the bewilderingly opaque bureaucratic apparatus that enables it?

Was the referendum correctly set up in the first place? Was 50% the correct limit for such a momentous decision, or should it have been 2/3rds? Should oldies - pensioners - have been allowed to vote at all? Can’t the Queen step in and say: “you bally idiots, it’s our (Queen’s perogative) country and we shall stay in the EU, if only so that one won’t have to produce one’s passport when travelling to one’s castle in Balmoral.”?

Whatever the answers to these questions, we are now left in the precarious position of Britain being a product sold yet never tested or proven out. We don’t even know if it will remain intact over the coming years: in engineering terms, it’s a state that was never validated before it was introduced to the customer.

Trial by error

The Leave campaign was based on disassociated presumptions that were packed into sentences in such a way as to sound like a way for the disaffected English middle to break free of - something - and to arrive at a much better - something else. Unfortunately, the Remain campaign was equally pathetic, having realised fairly early on (presumably in the split second after David Cameron announced the referendum), that the EU is impossible to be passionate about these days.

Neither side made any attempt made to list out the various implications of each necessary step towards leaving the EU, and could therefore make no list of mitigating measures to prevent the worst of those repercussions hitting the UK as hard as it might.

The UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world will have to be hammered out in real-time as uncertainties - and some avoidable certainties - cause unpleasant and unforeseen things to happen.

The future UK will only become what it will be once everything that might happen to it has happened to it. And not much of that will have been properly thought through before the 23rd of June - it certainly won’t adhere to the peddaled flickers of a dream of a greater, better, Britain.

What now? A question to self

There still seems to be a residual hope that the increasingly well-known Article 50 (the procedure for leaving the EU) won’t be triggered: but there’s no great point in holding out for that, especially as I wouldn’t have to act if that turns out to be the case.

If Britain really does start to extricate itself from the EU, I’ll presumably have to start acting - so I should start planning soon or risk falling into the same “dreamland trap” as the politicians. It will most likely involve looking to apply for a European (Irish or German) passport and finding out how my status in Germany will change over time.

But that’s all for the future. For now I need to strip out as much of the first three feelings that I mentioned at the top of this post - frustration, disbelief, anger - and settle to a state of vaguely positive curiosity as to how things will turn out.

This will mean reading as little as possible about the politicians (the Boris Johnsons, Michael Goves, Iain Duncan-Smiths and F*****s of this world), forgetting as much as possible the geographic and demographic divides that this referendum revealed, and hoping that the British “Apparat”, the civil servants, regulators, negotiators and the like, are as good as they might reasonably be expected to be when entering discussions with their European, American, Chinese counterparts…

… or am I selling myself yet another dream?