Brexit happened. Now, some advice from Nigel Farage’s next target, America

The EU is a group of countries which hold one another in check, while the US is a sometime bully and a ruthless capitalist. Swapping one for the other will not work in Britain’s favor

There was a time when I wrote about Brexit every day. The ins and outs of it, the votes, the main players, the Labour and Conservative then Independent Group then Liberal Democrat members who didn’t want it to happen. The possibility of a second referendum, the endless debating about the backstop, the chlorinated chicken, Boris Johnson driving a digger saying “GET BREXIT DONE”. I watched the referendum results roll in from my desk in the London newsroom, and then I helped report on the endless votes on endless Brexit deals and amendments by two separate prime ministers and many more politicians besides from The Independent’s bureau in New York. I went on marches about it. I had arguments on Facebook about it. I vacillated between self-pity, self-flagellation and anger. I claimed I would never renew my passport.

Then Brexit Day came around this week and I just… didn’t care.

I care deeply about the issues involved, of course. But, like many British people, I’ve been Nigel-Faraged into apathy and political fatigue. I’ve started to embrace nihilism. I have a lot of thoughts, but I find myself responding to, “So what about Brexit?” with a shrug a lot these days. I have no more fight to give. I don’t even know what I would be fighting any more.

You see, when you watch it all play out from across the Atlantic, the whole Brexit charade looks even stupider than it does from the inside. Like every Brit with a penchant for masochism, I watched the video this week of Farage and his crew in the European parliament waving miniature Union Jacks while unamused Brussels bureaucrats looked away, embarrassed for us. And I felt real sadness when I saw that videos of Second World War veterans had been projected onto the white cliffs of Dover, all of them talking about how much they regretted seeing us break with Europe at such a precarious time.

But I live in America now, and I know that we need to save our energy for what is to come. Fighting against the tide of Brexit – of “sore losers” and “Remoaners” and “give us our country back” – was a useless struggle. Fighting for our rights outside the European Union is more doable and more worthwhile. We have spent a long time divided along old lines. It’s time for us to stand together against things that do matter; it is time, dare I say it, for all of us to stand up for British values.

The US is the UK’s biggest hope for a trade deal: Johnson has made that very clear, and Donald Trump even clearer (though the NHS is “not for sale”, of course, not at all, well, you know, maybe a little but privatization already happens and anyway, listen, 40 more hospitals and 6 billion more nurses). A lot of Brits assume that a newly strengthened alliance with the US can only be a good thing: we share a language, after all, and our kids watch American cartoons and wear T-shirts branded with American flags while British businesses – Cadbury’s, PG Tips – get snapped up by American conglomerates and sold right back to us, just as delicious. What could be wrong with becoming just a little bit more like America? Doesn’t chlorine kill bacteria on the chickens anyway? And isn’t bacteria bad?

The US is a wonderful country in many respects, but it can be downright evil when it comes to some specific issues which are pertinent to trade. Healthcare is just one issue – the American approach to healthcare, which stubbornly repeats “free markets make us more free” until everybody drops dead, has led to the opioid crisis, diabetics self-sanctioning insulin, unacceptably high mortality rates for pregnant women and newborns, and poor people buying fish antibiotics on Amazon in an attempt to treat the ailments they can’t afford to have diagnosed. It didn’t start out this way. It wasn’t even anywhere near this bad a decade ago. But it’s an incredibly lucrative industry, and mainstream Americans still consider the idea that healthcare is a human right to be radical, communist stuff. British people of all stripes should be vigilant about protecting our NHS because of that. There is so much money to be made from scraping away at the edges of our wonderful, free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare system.

The US can also be insidious in the way in which it uses trade deals to control the countries most reliant upon it. These don’t just affect developing countries – Canada was one of the main victims of Trump’s trigger-happy tariff strategy in 2018, simply because the US is its main trading partner by virtue of proximity. If we put ourselves at the mercy of American politicians by depending too heavily upon their trade, we can easily be crippled by the whims of another Trump. The EU is a group of countries which hold one another in check; the US is a sometime bully and a ruthless capitalist, and our reliance on it will not have the same flavor as our former reliance on the EU.

As evidenced by the loud line of protesters outside my office today, American companies also do terribly on animal welfare legislation. The chicken is chlorinated because the conditions those chickens live in have the potential to be so much worse. Antibiotics in meat is the norm, as are animals being bred so large that their legs cannot support their weight. Captive wild animals’ use in circuses is legal. The UK was the first country in the world to pass any form of animal welfare legislation (in 1822) so opposing such blatantly cruel practices should come naturally to us. We shouldn’t let the issue fall by the wayside as we scrabble to prevent a Brexit recession.

Lastly, there’s another thing we should resist bringing into British culture from our American cousins: unquestioned nationalism. Here in the US, people are bullied and yelled at for not standing for the national anthem at a football game. Children are told to mindlessly recite words about pledging their allegiance to a flag in schools. Members of the military are loudly pronounced “American heroes”, “doing their duty” by “fighting for American values” – even though most of the people telling you that couldn’t point to Iraq or Afghanistan on a map (no fault of their own: American educational standards are pretty unacceptably low, too).

A little bit of good-hearted patriotism is fine, if not really for me (I’ve always considered where one is born to be an accident of fate, rather than something to be “proud” of); unabated nationalism is toxic. Brexit patriotism, too, is ridiculous: we are not being “liberated” from anything except an alliance willingly entered into, whatever some Brexiteers’ victim complexes might tell them. If you start believing your nationality bestows you with something special, you can easily also start believing other people’s nationalities make them inferior. Hopefully, our natural British cynicism will guard against anyone getting too carried away in that regard. I can’t stand the thought of a British countryside punctuated with flagpoles, a la Alabama.

I’m no longer interested in who wanted to leave, who wanted to remain, and who didn’t turn up to the ballot box because they didn’t care or it was raining. What I am interested in is maintaining the parts of the country I love, rather than selling them off to a country I’m well acquainted with. I hope that, with Brexit Day out the way, we can all agree on that. Or at least more than 51 per cent of us.

Meanwhile, I’ll be staying in the US if Brexit becomes a disaster. And my good friend Nigel has already said he might join me.