Shared Values ‘You just get us out. I’ll look after my family.’ Respondent on being warned of the economic consequences of leaving the European Union. Don’t waste your time on reason or on economic homily. This man means just what he says. But what he means By ‘us’ is ‘them’ of course; them foreigners who’re here To take our work. ‘They’re a bloody load of scroungers.’ ‘Hanging around on corners.’ ‘My mum lives in fear.’ ‘They’ve even taken over Dave’s the ironmongers.’ ‘Can’t understand a single word they say.’ ‘What are they jabbering on about anyway?’ ‘You get us out of Europe. We’ll get them out here.’ Such sentiments have nothing much to do with Politics. When Moseley sent his fascists on the march Down Cable Street against the Jew it was Communists Who held the line despite the efforts of the boys in blue. Yet only twenty years went by for men from London docks To march in sympathy with Enoch Powell, although it’s true Their bêtes noirs this time were indeed ‘them blacks’. For Johnson’s racist followers them blacks are white again, EU workers blamed for others’ failure in a bitterly divided house While bigots from the supposed party of the many Use social media for a kind of online Juden Raus. Now I too find myself an alien in what was my native land. Deracinated by my education and allegiance to a strand Of European culture abhorrent to the ‘Rule Britannia’ crew. I find myself derided as a ‘citizen of nowhere’, unlike you A ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, as Stalin called the disaffected Artists of his day. Will they come for me? I wonder. Should I stay?
Peter Lloyd Jones 