I have covered many stories that marked me over the past 40 years, in war zones and outside them, but none that has affected me as personally as Britain’s exit from the European Union. Brexit Day,
now upon us, feels like the end of hope, a moral collapse, a self-amputation that will make the country where I grew up poorer in every sense.
Poorer materially, of course, but above all poorer in its shriveled soul, divorced from its neighborhood, internally fractured, smaller, meaner, more insular, more alone, no longer a protagonist in the great miracle of the postwar years — Europe’s journey toward borderless peace and union. Britain, in a fit of deluded jingoism, has opted for littleness.
The fiasco was captured this week when that pompous and pitiful British nationalist, Nigel Farage, waved a miniature Union Jack in the European Parliament as he bid farewell and
was cut off by the vice-president of the Parliament, Mairead McGuinness. “Put your flags away, you’re leaving, and take them with you,” she said.
Farage looked like a sheepish schoolboy caught breaking rules. He blushed. An Irish woman from a country uplifted by European Union membership reprimanding the new breed of little-England male as he exits history in pursuit of an illusion: the symbolism was perfect. “Hip, hip hooray!” Farage’s flag-waving Brexit Party cohorts chanted. Save me, please, for I shall weep.