Why I shall always be a Remainer ... (30 December 2020)

That’s it. We’ve left the EU. We’ve swapped membership of a great international club for a sort of handwritten visitor’s-pass. We’ve done it to appease a motley and dubious crowd of braying nationalists. I don’t know, by the way, if this will make us richer, or if it will make us poorer. Neither do you. Neither does anyone. Both sides wheel-out their tame economic think-tanks to make contradictory forecasts. Yet even when Brexit has become old news, let’s say in ten years’ time, when all the dust has settled and economists have done their sums, do you know what? We still won’t know. We’ll still be arguing. Because who knows what the alternative future might have been? Remainers will say it would have been rosier. Leavers will say it would have been bleaker. Jacob Rees-Mogg will be telling us it will take fifty more years before we know. Well, good luck with that.

Here’s where I stand on the whole sorry argument. I’m a Remainer. I shall still be a Remainer even if Britain’s economy booms spectacularly after Brexit as Boris Johnson promises us it will, or equally, if it fails, as many economists and the Financial Times choose to believe. My argument, you see, has nothing to do with the economy, or trade deals, or customs unions, or tariffs. I’m not worried about the colour of our passports, or the plight of farmers in Northern Ireland, or lorries parking up on the M2 at Dover. Or fish. I am concerned however, about our belligerent desire to build barriers between peoples, as if somehow we are different, as if we breathe different air or have different numbers of legs. We are all related, the Brits, and the Belgians, and the Bulgars, and the Bolivians and every other label we can choose to hang around the necks of people, but we have lost sight of this. Let me demonstrate this. Consider your cousins. If your first cousin is someone who shares one (or usually two) of your grandparents, and your second cousin shares one of your great grandparents, it turns out that almost no one on the planet is more distant from you than a 27^th cousin. Most people are a whole lot closer. We are all related. We have been fooled by ephemeral things like skin colour or language to imagine that humans belong in races or nationalities, but genetically we’re all pretty much the same. There is more genetic difference between a chimpanzee in Senegal and another in Uganda than there is between an Inuit and a Maori, or a Yorkshireman and a Chinaman. It really doesn’t help us to define ourselves by the patch of land where we happen to have been born (or the island we happen to think of as home). We are one human family, and if the world belongs to anyone, it belongs to all of us equally. Understanding this, and treating the world as our common responsibility, is the best (and possibly only) hope for our species. We only have one planet. It is the cradle and home of our species. Whether you were born in Ruislip or Rio, whether you’re a Briton or a Breton, a Ghanian or a Guyanian, we all have a right to live and breathe the same air, to grow up, to raise families, and to pursue happiness or whatever it is we want to pursue (within reason of course). And it seems to me that the biggest barrier we have to this great ideal is our almost religious devotion to the idea of the nation state with its precious little borders and its pretentions of autonomy. I like to think that one day, probably long after you and I are dust, the squabble of little nations and fragile egos and tiny minded bigotries that infect our planet and keep us all at arm’s length will dissolve and we will come together as a people to manage, and curate this planet, and its tribes, and its wildlife, in a way we simply don’t do today. And in that regard I saw the European Union as one small, tentative, local, step in the right direction.

OK. So perhaps I’m a fantasist. But bear with me a little longer. The EU wasn’t (and isn’t) a perfect organisation. We agree on that. But it can (and does) legislate on environmental issues across a whole continent. That’s important. The EU has some of the world’s highest environmental standards, and laws passed in Brussels help protect natural habitats, keep air and water clean, ensure proper waste disposal, and help businesses move toward sustainable economies. Tin-pot nations that don’t belong to a global bloc like the EU don’t bother making these kinds of rules. Why should they? Only a big club like the EU can do this.

And the EU is growing. Or it was growing until Britain decided to take its ball away. It was nine countries. Now it’s 28. One day it might absorb countries in the Middle East, in Central Asia, and North Africa and who knows, it could, one day become a global union. I hope it does. I hope Brexit doesn’t put the brakes on this. And I hope, when it does finally reach a critical mass, it won’t be too late to save our planet from greedy, feuding, nation states.

Nation states are the problem. They’re not the solution. Not even Britain. Nation states like to think they can do whatever they want. They can make their own rules. And they do. But a world of competing nation states is a world that rapes the planet of its resources, that stifles the freedom of its people to travel, that overlooks famines and disasters in other countries. Nations go to war with other nations. Nations can’t manage the oceans. They can’t manage the climate. They can’t halt deforestation. They can’t stop mass extinctions. 

Yet the idea of the nation state is so deeply embedded in our collective view of the world that it is a difficult shibboleth to topple. All around the world children learn about the glorious histories of their own nations. Every other country is a potential enemy. That’s the lesson we all grow up believing. Brexit was driven by a whole basket of grievances, but more than this, it was driven by a nationalistic belief in British exceptionalism, the idea that we are somehow better than the Poles and Hungarians, that the sun that shines on Britain is our sun, that the fish in the sea are ours, that Queen still rules an empire, and the map is still pink. But none of this is true.

 The EU isn’t a global talking-shop like the UN. It’s a pragmatic single market with free trade and free movement and regulations and regulatory oversight and a court. It is an organisation that survives by respecting its members, celebrating their differences, and trying to find consensus. Imagine a world run like that. Is it such a bad idea? Really?

This is why I want to stay part of the club. I don’t expect Britain to rejoin for a generation at least – but I will support any campaign to rejoin. I’m a remainer. I will always be a remainer. And I’m proud of that.

 

Covid-19 / Corona Virus and Not Forgetting the Whale (12th Feb 2020)

[This was posted to my blog on 12th February 2020 when we were only just beginning to hear about Coronavirus - just in case you wonder why some of it sounds a little weird now...]

First an apology. I’m a rubbish blogger. This is my first post since my sixtieth birthday blog, and that was, ahem, five and a bit years ago. My blog history has skipped right past my third novel, ‘Not Forgetting the Whale,’ as if it never happened, and I probably ought to be thinking about blogging ahead of my next book, ‘The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild.’ But events of recent weeks (I’m thinking now about the Covid-19 Corona Virus) have reminded me of Not Forgetting the Whale, so maybe it is time, at last, for a blog.

Not Forgetting the Whale (if you haven’t read it) is a whimsical and slightly allegorical tale about the collapse of civilisation following a worldwide flu pandemic. If that sounds a little heavy, it might help to add that the story is told almost entirely from the perspective of a tiny Cornish fishing community. The fictional village of St Piran was a familiar environment for me to write about. I was seventeen when my family left Nairobi and reinvented themselves as shopkeepers in Mevagissey, a village on the Cornish coast. My mother had grown up there, and she longed to go back. My parents bought a general store in the square, right by the harbour, and I worked there, during school and university holidays, stacking shelves, slicing bacon, and delivering groceries to houses around the village. One of my regular deliveries was to the writer Colin Wilson who lived a short way out of town in a rambling old farmhouse. It was a real writer’s home – filled with books. ‘I should love to be a writer,’ I told him once, after I had carried a box of groceries into his kitchen. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you want to be a writer, then you will be. You won’t have any choice.’

I thought, at first, I would hate Mevagissey. My friends were far away, and this little town (especially in winter) was desperately quiet and remote. But, like Joe, the protagonist of Whale, I discovered instead a most extraordinary community. Within weeks I had learned the names and faces of dozens of villagers, I had made new friends, and I had started to understand the support network that every villager seemed to be part of. It was unexpected. It was a joy.

I wanted to write about this for a long time. What I needed was a story. On a train from London to Liverpool I found myself reading a magazine article by the science writer Debora Mackenzie. The title of the article was, ‘Could a Pandemic bring down Western Civilisation?’ The idea was simple, yet terrifying. Complexity theory suggests that once a society develops beyond a certain level, it becomes dangerously fragile. It reaches a point where even a minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down. A pandemic flu – for example. I had my story. I became fascinated by arcane things like … supply chains.

The whole way our civilisation works – even the systems involved in putting food onto our tables - has become labyrinthine in its complexity, involving high-tech farm machinery, refrigerated warehouses, networks of specialist distributors, and complicated packaging. It relies on the availability of fuel, spare parts for all the machines, the health and reliability of drivers and packers and dozens of other trades, the electronic exchange of currency, good road, rail, and other transport networks, and who knows how easy it would be for any one of these systems to fail. The fact that it all works amazingly well means we don’t tend to think of it as a risky process. And yet it is. A small disruption could grind the whole machine to a halt. 

This is the central thesis behind Not Forgetting the Whale. A pandemic flu, originating in the Far East, is brought unwittingly to Britain by passengers on a long distance flight, and after that, public fear takes over. Oil imports stop. Key workers stay home. Power stations grind to a halt. Shops are raided and shelves are emptied of produce. I had a quotation in my mind, ‘Civilisation is only three square meals away from anarchy.’ This quotation (from the TV Series Red Dwarf) drove the story.   

And now, here we are facing Covid-19. It’s a flu-like virus from China that threatens to explode into a pandemic.  Could it lead to the same situation that faces St Piran in The Whale?

And I suppose the answer has to be … yes.

But there is a glimmer of hope. In Not Forgetting the Whale the forecast for humanity is grim. But humankind (in general) and St Piran (in particular) defy the pundits and bounce back. They do this by, well, … pulling together and sharing things, and generally being nice to one another. They overturn all the assumptions of apocalyptic fiction that see us hunkering down with shotguns and fighting over the last scrap of bread. The flu virus, far from destroying us, ends up bringing us closer together. Maybe that should give us hope.   

Although the villagers of St Piran do have the help of a whale, of course. Let’s not forget that.