A new ending

Overdubbed onto the start of Roger Water’s The Last Refugee is a series of excerpts in clipped English accents taken from BBC News and shipping forecasts. The track comes from his 2017 record Is This the Life We Really Want? which is infused with snippets of audio nostalgia. One of the announcements used in the song proclaims the last day of the year, Thursday 31 December, 1970.

On that day the United Kingdom was not a member of the European Economic Community. (The country would later join, along with Ireland, on 1 January 1973.) Of course the world was a different place then. The New Year’s Eve breaking news was that Paul McCartney had filed a lawsuit to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership. It signalled an inauspicious beginning to the coming decade, devoid of the wide-eyed optimism of the 1960s.

Today, fifty years later, another ending has come. The U.K. leaves the European Union. It does so at midnight -notably- according to CET in Brussels, the locus of EU power. Perhaps Greenwich’s Shepherd Gate Clock will solemnly mark it at 11pm. The GMT timepiece was bombed in the Blitz but thankfully survived the blast. The incendiary device that smashed into the observatory wall in 1940 serves as a useful touchstone to the U.K.’s present day allegations of European hegemony under the guise of the EU.

Shepherd Gate Clock Shepherd Gate Clock. Source: Wikipedia

Go forth and be merry

The divisive campaigns for both ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ (fought in a geopolitical atmosphere mired by Trump’s ascendance and COVID-19) felt to a casual observer like myself to be politics going through the motions. An imperfect system hijacked by extremists and ideologues. Will Big Ben’s Brexit bong bolster Britons’ belief in their inalienable right to influence world affairs? (How’s that for Daily Mail?) Perhaps it harkens back to recent ringings of Westminster’s division bells instead. A discordant soundtrack of internal strife. The political capital has now been spent and the hubristic pantomime of splendid isolation replaced by negotiations with serious consequences.

So rebuild the railways,
Firm up all the roads,
No one is leaving,
Now this is your home…
All lost in a painting of a sky coloured oil,
In this Merrie Land.

Merrie Land by The Good, the Bad and the Queen

Brexit is not the hill on which the U.K. will perish but it’s arguably a very poor strategy for success in the fitness landscape of European affairs. In time the self imposed restrictions of sovereignty may dissolve the nebulous ambitions of ‘sunlit uplands’. The next generation of U.K. citizens may not nurture the same feelings of victimhood as their forebears. The current relationship between the U.K. and the EU is on shaky ground, with Ireland in an awkward position. We all need to live alongside each other. I hope the impoverished connections will (again) give way to newer and better bonds, over the next 50 years.