Brexitland { 67 images } Created 1 Aug 2019
South Lincolnshire always seemed far away, not least when you grew up there. It’s mostly fenland, with flat damp spaces and big skies separating people and places, as often as not hidden behind tall fences.
It’s an insular place, by the sea, yet blocked from it by the Wash, salt marsh and mud flats –more suitable for a prison, than weekend breaks. Boston once had a major port, but it silted-up centuries ago, long before the town got its real claim to fame – having a namesake in America, because once upon a time, early pilgrim fathers failed from here to escape to the new world.
More recently it had flowers, tulips to rival the Netherlands – great flat fields of color, and an annual festival in Spalding – now gone. The land remains, but brassicas picked by migrant labour is far less picturesque claim to fame.
I left as soon as I could, and went as far as I could, from London to Japan and China, though family remains there – one part living in what feels like the middle of nowhere, at the end of a long potholed lane, hard up against a dike built to keep the land drained, and still not considered local after 40 years residence, in a kind of un-armed stalemate with the neighbours.
This obscure region, that haunted my childhood, has been transformed by the 2016 referendum into the poster-boy for Brexit – the two Fenland districts, side-by-side – Boston, and South Holland, winning the first and second prizes for who could vote most extremely for Brexit – with three further neighbouring districts coming in in the top ten, only the last one, dipping under a 70% threshold, all on a massive turnout.
The vote came as a shock to me, for my Britain had become a metropolitan and international one. The sense of dislocation, when I realized that the ground zero of this vote was not in distant Yorkshire, or obscure Thanet, but from the familiar corner that I came from, and to which I regularly return.
I left what I thought of as ‘Britain’ under Thatcher (another gift from South Lincolnshire to the world) and suddenly woke up to find myself trying to understand what was this ‘England’, and why did it vote as it did, what was this place, that had suddenly come to seem as a foreign country?
I didn’t expect the volume of migration, I didn’t expect the degree of insecurity – but then I also didn’t expect the number of mobility scooters, or the eloquence of people’s reasoning. As one market trader said to me last month, ‘I voted leave and didn’t understand why, but since then, I’ve been getting informed – ‘have you read the Lisbon Treaty? No, well I have, twice, and now I know why I voted as I did’. Another trader, one of the few who voted remain, laughs, but sells his fish at a discount to the passersby who can’t afford the normal prices – an act of kindness but also an acknowledgement of a seemingly collapsed social system – which mass migration has not helped .....
It’s an insular place, by the sea, yet blocked from it by the Wash, salt marsh and mud flats –more suitable for a prison, than weekend breaks. Boston once had a major port, but it silted-up centuries ago, long before the town got its real claim to fame – having a namesake in America, because once upon a time, early pilgrim fathers failed from here to escape to the new world.
More recently it had flowers, tulips to rival the Netherlands – great flat fields of color, and an annual festival in Spalding – now gone. The land remains, but brassicas picked by migrant labour is far less picturesque claim to fame.
I left as soon as I could, and went as far as I could, from London to Japan and China, though family remains there – one part living in what feels like the middle of nowhere, at the end of a long potholed lane, hard up against a dike built to keep the land drained, and still not considered local after 40 years residence, in a kind of un-armed stalemate with the neighbours.
This obscure region, that haunted my childhood, has been transformed by the 2016 referendum into the poster-boy for Brexit – the two Fenland districts, side-by-side – Boston, and South Holland, winning the first and second prizes for who could vote most extremely for Brexit – with three further neighbouring districts coming in in the top ten, only the last one, dipping under a 70% threshold, all on a massive turnout.
The vote came as a shock to me, for my Britain had become a metropolitan and international one. The sense of dislocation, when I realized that the ground zero of this vote was not in distant Yorkshire, or obscure Thanet, but from the familiar corner that I came from, and to which I regularly return.
I left what I thought of as ‘Britain’ under Thatcher (another gift from South Lincolnshire to the world) and suddenly woke up to find myself trying to understand what was this ‘England’, and why did it vote as it did, what was this place, that had suddenly come to seem as a foreign country?
I didn’t expect the volume of migration, I didn’t expect the degree of insecurity – but then I also didn’t expect the number of mobility scooters, or the eloquence of people’s reasoning. As one market trader said to me last month, ‘I voted leave and didn’t understand why, but since then, I’ve been getting informed – ‘have you read the Lisbon Treaty? No, well I have, twice, and now I know why I voted as I did’. Another trader, one of the few who voted remain, laughs, but sells his fish at a discount to the passersby who can’t afford the normal prices – an act of kindness but also an acknowledgement of a seemingly collapsed social system – which mass migration has not helped .....
