It’s late July 2019, just after Boris Johnson has become Britain’s new prime minister, and the frustration of the whole Brexit discussion has got the better of me. “I’ve had enough,” I tell British friends here in Munich. “The crass level of debate, incompetent politicians, the whole thing.”
Apart from a bit of cricket — England won the World Cup in mid-July and we were euphoric for a few days — Brexit had been the number-one subject all summer. In fact, three years after the referendum in June 2016, Brexit seemed to have been going on forever.
I’m going to be travelling to the north-east of England soon, to visit my family, in the coastal town of Marske, ten miles from the industrial town of Middlesbrough. But I haven’t even booked a flight. The thought of another mammoth journey of trains, airports and planes — around 11 hours of total travel time — wasn’t improving my already weary pre-Britain mood.
“I’m not flying,” I told friends. “I’ve had enough of airports, aeroplanes and all that stress. I’m doing the whole journey by train, Munich to Middlesbrough and back.” The response was much laughing and joking about how I might not actually arrive in Middlesbrough by the time Brexit had happened, by its latest planned date of 31 October.
In fact, the decision to go by train wasn’t quite as sudden as I have suggested here. For weeks, I’d been basking in the summer sun of Munich, my home as a journalist for the past 18 years. After finishing yet another book on the climate crisis — David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (read it: it should change your life) — and writing about climate protests in Munich all year, including the Fridays for Future movement, I decided that I could no longer justify flying to England every year.
A divided country
Middlesbrough, a few weeks later, and it’s a balmy 25 degrees. Europe’s railways have done a great job of getting me here on time, and compared to aeroplane travel, it’s good for the planet and stress free. I’m in an optimistic mood to take a look at Brexit Britain.
“It’s split the country,” John Jobling tells me in that familiar Geordie accent that’s so unfathomable to so many people outside the north-east of England — and, to be honest, to quite a number of people within the north-east, too. “It’s split families,” he says. “It’s split friendships.” There’s genuine pain in his face, in his voice.
I’m on my way to watch Middlesbrough play football against Millwall, a team from east London. I can’t understand why a Geordie — meaning someone from Newcastle, 40 miles up the road — is in Middlesbrough on a Saturday afternoon. It turns out that Jobling is here because he’s a photographer, interested in Middlesbrough’s Victorian- and industrial-era architecture. He has seen me taking photos for this article as I’m walking to the football ground.
Middlesbrough was once a thriving industrial powerhouse of a town. It manufactured the iron and steel of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Further afield, the Middlesbrough firm Dorman Long designed and built the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Back in 1862, the future British prime minister William Gladstone described the town as an “infant Hercules”. Minutes across the River Tees is its sister town, Stockton. In 1825, the world’s first passenger railway set off from here to Darlington, 25 miles away.
Though it still has a sizeable chemical industry, Middlesbrough has suffered immeasurably because of deindustrialization and the austerity imposed by the UK government after the financial crisis of 2007–08. Middlesbrough and the towns and villages around it come at the bottom or near bottom of endless lists of statistics reflecting deep-seated deprivation, chronic underinvestment and terrible health problems. In the 2016 referendum, more than 65 per cent of people in Middlesbrough and nearby Redcar voted for Brexit.
Before the game, I head to Middlesbrough’s Mannequin Cafe and sit with Polish-born owner, Margaret, talking Brexit. To my right, five or six travel books about Poland; to my left, a menu, with Polish dishes alongside typical modern British cafe food: delicious-looking cakes, teas, cappuccino and fried breakfasts.
Margaret and husband, Armand, moved here 13 years ago and got permanent residency eight years ago. Their daughter was born here and has British citizenship. They’re happy and don’t intend to return to live in Poland. But they’ve been told they need to reapply for residency. “It’s completely unfair,” says Margaret. “The government, the local council, knows everything about us. We have bank accounts, our daughter was born here, we have mortgages, we’ve paid our taxes, we work here.”
She tells me the story of Polish friends who have three kids. The husband has had his residency status accepted, his wife had hers rejected. “It’s ridiculous. They’ve been here for 12 years. It’s unbelievable.”
And the football game? It was a passionate 1–1 draw. The Millwall manager was shown a red card for violent behaviour. It seemed a depressingly fitting analogy for Brexit: a game with no winner, lots of anger and disappointment.
A united family
Middlesbrough, Redcar and Marske were all majority Brexit towns in 2016. But not everyone who lives there has given up on the EU. My mother, father and two sisters have spent decades as Labour party activists. They all voted remain. I wasn’t allowed to vote, one of millions of British citizens who are disenfranchised — both at general elections and referendums — simply for living abroad for too long (more than 15 years).
My elder sister, Sarah, works for Redcar’s Labour member of parliament, Anna Turley, a firm opponent of Brexit. Jane, my younger sister, is a teacher in Whitby, 20 miles away, where Middlesbrough-born explorer Captain Cook did his training with a local shipping firm. My whole family lives in Marske, a small working-class town that is 15 minutes from both Middlesbrough and the bucolic North Yorkshire Moors National Park.
Sarah’s boss, Anna Turley, is besieged with problems because both the local Labour Party and the national party are bitterly divided into “pro- Corbynites” and “anti-Corbynites”, a reference to the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn. A group of local activists are determined to deselect Turley in favour of someone more supportive of Labour’s leader. It’s a situation repeated across England. Few ordinary voters know whether Labour is pro- or anti-Brexit, such has been the confusion coming from the party. At the same time, Brexiters have many times threatened Turley and her staff with violence, mostly anonymously and online.
Local deprivation comes in many guises. At the start of the 2019–20 school year, my sister Jane started a Facebook group to encourage parents with “old” school uniforms to offer them to other parents who needed them. Within a few weeks, more than 300 local parents were giving and receiving school uniforms for free. This means savings of hundreds of pounds for families. It also helps to put food on tables. Food banks are a fact of life for countless families across the United Kingdom. This, in the world’s fifth-largest economy.
A loss of tolerance
It’s the day after the football game and I’m taking the seven-minute train trip to the picturesque seaside town of Saltburn, part of one of the Middlesbrough parliamentary constituencies. At the very end of the 208-metre pier that stretches out into what today is a cerulean North Sea, overlooking beaches that are full with families, I get talking to Joanna Krupowicz and Bartosz Kin. Both are 27, and both vets, here on a day trip from the northern English city of Leeds.
They’re from Poland, attracted by “the high quality of training and job opportunities,” says Krupowicz. They’re young, working, flexible and, as a result, they’re remarkably relaxed about Brexit. “We’ve had no negative experiences here,” says Kin. “We’d simply move if things got difficult residency-wise.” Their youthful flexibility is admirable, but Britain has a serious shortage of vets and is struggling to attract new ones from abroad because of Brexit.
After a few hours in Saltburn, I’ve had enough of asking people about Brexit — I’d prefer to enjoy the sunshine and admire the stunning coastline. Most people just want Brexit to end. Pro-Brexiters spout familiar vacuous phrases — “regain sovereignty”, “leave means leave”, “we want our country back” — parroting their political heroes Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage. Details of what this means isn’t explained in any coherent way.
I walk from the pier, along the seafront, heading to Saltburn’s Ship Inn, a traditional pub with beer garden, located metres from the sea. I’ve been here countless times. On the way, I get talking to three young men in jeans and T-shirts. “We’re from Iraq,” one says in broken English. “Iraqi-Kurdistan,” says another. I’ve got close friends from Iraq and have read many books on Iraq’s history. We start chatting, and they’re delighted I know a little about the country. Then, a voice behind me shouts: “You all right, mate?” A young man, around 25, shorts, no T-shirt, is standing street-fighter-like, metres away. “Need any help?” he asks me. I’m confused. “What? Why?” He looks comically menacingly at the three Iraqis.
This guy is not representative of Saltburn. But he does represent an anti-foreigner sentiment that was not as public, not as belligerent, before the 2016 referendum. To be clear: not all Brexiters are racist, anti-migrant, right-wing thugs. But Britain feels less tolerant today than it did before the Brexit debate.
Worlds apart
A week later, back in Munich, and it’s still hot. And Brexit is still the number-one subject. I reflect on how fortunate I am to be living here, in one of Europe’s safest and richest cities. Low unemployment, low inequality, low levels of social deprivation and a good public transport system.
Of course, Munich is far from perfect — just ask a local about the housing costs or the late trains. But right now, it feels a world away from Middlesbrough and Redcar, with their deprivation and their never-ending Brexit.