Astonishingly, almost unimaginably (to those of us working in education at any rate), the nation has voted to leave Europe.
Oh dear. Already I might be accused of inaccuracy: dealing with this whole issue of the referendum and its result we find ourselves walking on eggshells and playing with the niceties of language (what rich pickings there are for English teachers: examples of hyperbole, polemic, contradiction, mixed metaphors; I guess downright lies don’t count).
Britain overall voted for Brexit: the English and Welsh nations certainly voted Out; but Scotland and Northern Ireland didn’t do so by any stretch of the imagination.
For students of politics (not enough of them in our schools), there is also plenty of learning material in the whole saga. Most pundits agree that the Leave majority came as a result of large swathes of the electorate, especially those Labour supporters in disadvantaged areas, choosing to give Westminster a kicking. To Cameron and Corbyn alike they were saying, with Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague on both your houses”.
Nigel Farage characterised the outcome as “ordinary, decent people” registering a protest. I like to think of myself as decent and fundamentally ordinary, but it seems I’m disbarred from his club: I belong to the educated elite that currently stands accused of ignoring and despising ordinary people.
Now for the next uncomfortable fact. Young people (aged 24 and below) voted overwhelmingly to Remain. Had English voting rights extended in age down to 16-year-olds, as in Scotland, it seems there would have been a narrow majority in favour of Remain instead of Leave. Young people in my school, as well as my own family and younger relatives, are for the most part outraged that my generation (to their mind) stitched them up, pulling them and their country out of Europe and blighting their chances of free movement of labour, employment, trade and wealth-creation inside Europe. They have every right to be angry.
To the rest of Europe, England (I mean England, rather than Britain) appears nasty. Arguments about immigration – despite numerous shrill denials from the more rational Brexiteers – assumed an unpleasantly racist tone. This vote is hostile and xenophobic: at the very least, that is how it appears in Europe.
I recall, at some stage in the campaign, Boris Johnson protesting: “I love Europe and Europeans. I just don’t want us to be part of that political system.” If he was sincere in that view, he made little effort to promote it in the debate which centred on anxieties about immigration and loss of jobs – or, more precisely, Little Englander views playing on irrational fears.
We should never have got hung up on immigration, nor on wild claims from both sides about what would happen to the economy in the event of a Leave or Remain vote. The debate should have been conducted on a rational and philosophical level: trying to analyse what it means to be both British and European; the very nature of our place in Europe; how, in truth, our sovereignty has never been under threat, and how arguments to the contrary were entirely spurious.
Perhaps we got it wrong in schools. I’ve always felt that my role as a head is not to tell young people how they should vote, nor to influence my colleagues: as a regular columnist, I believed I had no business to persuade, though I was ready enough to point out lies and distortions presented by both sides of the argument.
Maybe I was mistaken.
Edmund Burke is alleged to have said (there is some dispute about its authenticity): “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.”
Have we Remainers, particularly those of us who are teachers, remained silent and allowed evil in? I hope it’s not that extreme, but I know one thing for certain: right now I feel ashamed to be counted English.
- Dr Bernard Trafford is head of Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School and a former chairman of HMC. His views are personal. Follow him @bernardtrafford