If you’re British, perhaps – just perhaps – you don’t fully understand the plight of today’s Anglophiles. You need to be a foreigner to grasp what’s at stake. Being an Anglophile, as I am, makes you a patriot of your adoptive land. You may live there, you may have lived there and now watch it from a distance; or you might’ve only seen it from afar, through books and media. Whichever your circumstances, you’re a proud Anglophile and no one can take that away from you. Not even Nigel Farage, let alone Boris Johnson. No chance.
Being an Anglophile involves being smitten with Ireland as well, which can sound controversial to a rather twisted mind; it has nothing to do with supporting colonisation and exploitation. But everything to do with an ardent anti-Brexit attitude.
As an Anglophile, you also tend to have an interest in other cultures. You spend resources – even those you don’t have – on planning to visit places; on figuring out how to settle elsewhere. It’s almost like a physical need, perhaps an incurable disease. Sometimes you’re an economic migrant, or a student, but more often than not you wish you were an economic migrant or a student just to have a reasonable excuse to move to the country intriguing you so much. Crazy stuff, I should know.
George Mikes knew this too. His legendary How to be an Alien (1946) was a book that poked fun at the English from the basis of a profound love for his new home. This Hungarian writer moved to London in 1938, aged 26, to work as a foreign correspondent for a Budapest newspaper and never went back.
In a chapter titled ‘How to be rude’ he wrote: “In the last century, when a wicked and unworthy subject annoyed the Sultan of Turkey or the Czar of Russia, he had his head cut off without much ceremony; but when the same happened in England, the monarch declared: ‘We are not amused’; and the whole British nation even now, a century later, is immensely proud of how rude their Queen was.”
On the same subject, Mikes also added this: “It is true that quite often you can hear remarks like … ‘Shut your big mouth!’ or ‘Dirty pig!’ etc. These remarks are very un-English and are the results of foreign influence. (Dating back, however, to the era of the Danish invasion.)”
I am very sorry to say that right across the spectrum of the Brexit discourse, humour of this sort – how British Mikes had already become by then is no surprise, to me at least – has been severely lacking. Maybe because there’s nothing to laugh about it. Eight years of severe, unjustified cuts by successive Conservative administrations – even hundreds of libraries got lobbed off, with no doubt How to be an Alien thrown in the bin several times as well (my copy is from one of the ubiquitous charity shops, the all new British public library) – led millions of struggling people to form a once-in-a-lifetime coalition with hardened, well-to-do Europhobes. Radical Eurosceptic leftists contributed to the infamous referendum’s outcome, but only marginally. So, please someone let Jeremy Corbyn know, before he gets too big-headed: we need him to be as clear-sighted as possible. We have no other choice but him. We all have to make do; us Anglophiles included, because, in case you haven’t noticed, we are sworn Europhiles as well.
The least patriotic of all political organisations – Theresa May’s, of course – has been strangling a country that used to rule the waves and now should rule Europe by rightfully imposing its grand gravitas. For what other country would be best suited to counterbalance Germany’s prowess? What other country is perceived – still – as democratic and neutral enough to play the much-needed role of arbiter? France is also great, but Paris can’t lead the way properly, and Berlin knows this. (Forget about Italy, especially now.) A non-Eurozone heavyweight would be a rather interesting option.
We bloody need London. Where is it? It’s hiding behind a political purdah, getting ready to come out of the European consortium: its moneyed elites have made the British people believe all their ills originate from across the Channel (the NHS chaos, the EU’s red tape and turbo-capitalists, Turkish hordes, and sundry unrepentant lies).
Time to campaign, hard, for a second referendum. I’m on my way over. Not just for laughs, although they are in short supply at the moment. This is serious.
(Written by Alessio Colonnelli on 14 September 2018, exclusively for this blog.)
Alessio Colonnelli 