The Lost Loves of Brexit
What I gained and the UK lost in the last decade
Some people find it awkward to admit they met on Tinder. Imagine owing your marriage to Teresa May.
It would make for an excellent rom-com if it wasn’t my life.
The scene: London, pre-financial crisis. Twenty-something English boy meets girl, Brazilian, who recently moved to London driven by a love of The Smiths, British culture and the national sense of humour.
In most rom-com plotlines, the obstacles in the way of true love tend to be long-lost exes, better-looking or more socially suitable romantic competition, parents who don’t approve, or a burning professional ambition at odds with romance.
In our case, the primary cock-blocker was Teresa May - who, before she was a beleaguered Prime Minister mired in The Brexit Wars, was the UK’s Home Secretary.
She assumed the role in the wake of the Conservatives making a loud and unattainable election promise to bring down net migration to the UK. Her signature move for achieving this was the aptly-branded Hostile Environment Policy: some of her signature ‘achievements’ over this period include The Windrush Scandal, and targeted bus-side OOH advertisements telling people to go home.
For countless numbers of people her tenure were miserable: for me it was a time when noxious but abstract political policies acquired a personal edge with the power to ruin my life - and a chance to examine some of the myths we tell ourselves about the UK’s tolerance for the first time.
It isn’t a popular topic for the centre-left to discuss exactly how to approach migration: it’s an almost unmanageable question, to ask most people who think of themselves as liberal what the right amount of immigration is, and how to enforce it. What seems to be the case from our experience is that in the UK we’re doing it wrong.
One of the many uniquely British strains of hypocrisy concerns migration: we talk about Global Britain and the Huguenots and the Kindertransport and De Gaulle broadcasting Radio Londres from the French House in World War 2, but find no cognitive dissonance in making life impossible for any foreigner trying to live here who isn’t an oligarch or a billionaire.
Around the Hostile Environment years this hypocrisy was in full evidence as “Global Britain” began to tweak the gears of its own immigration apparatus to make every phase as becoming a citizen as hard as possible. It was a time of heartache, gut ache, and ball-ache.
Shit Reality Show Pitch: Love Island, but with extra immigration paperwork
True love and citizenship bureaucracy make for an odd mix. It was like the pilot season of Britain’s strangest reality TV format - Love Island with added admin.
Being a couple trapped in this bizarre ménage à trois with the British state meant that alongside all the standard steps in a relationship - discussing exes, meeting families, first arguments, introductions to friends - I watched my wife-to-be navigate her way through an absurd obstacle course of rule changes, applications and paperwork.
The early phase of our relationship was dogged by near-continuous administrative drama, its first years measured out in the differing visas that my wife applied for just to continue her life in the UK. She referred to the process as a sort of prolonged bureaucratic version of ‘he’s just not that into you’, endlessly throwing herself at a country that rejected her no matter how hard she tried.
The results were straight out of Kafka: the government could demand someone who had represented the UK in an international creative forum due to her English writing skills that she had to pay extra money to a government-recommended test provider to prove she could speak the language - and then, when she presented those test results at an immigration office, remanded her passport due to an issue with the test provider that they recommended.
At one point, having spent a substantial amount of money trying to bulletproof her application for the next round of visa renewals, she was informed by the lawyers handling it that the rules were changing so frequently it was near-impossible to guarantee that any applicant would be a success.
In user experience design this is called ‘injecting friction into the process’: in real life, it amounts to ‘keep changing the application rules until people give up’.
I found myself wondering what would happen when love isn’t enough. My behaviour around that time was driven by a fear that one day the person I had fallen in love with would just roll over in bed, receive word of some new administrative hoop she had to jump through, look at me in the cold light of day, conclude that it wasn’t worth it and move to a more welcoming country with better dentistry.
I still look at her almost every day and think of all the parallel branches of the Multiverse where she did just that, and the smaller and more shuffling life that it would have condemned me to if she’d taken the easy road and given up.
But she didn’t give up.
Reader, we got married.
Love 1, Visa System 0
Perhaps the strangest side-effect of all of this: the more of these administrative sticking-points we stumbled through, the closer we got. Every new bit of administrative hassle was a stick or twist moment where it would have been quite simple, and rational, to walk away. Neither of us did.
After yet another additional rule change meant that there was a real risk of the love of my life having to leave for good, we got married.
I resented having my relationship accelerated through a key milestone by my home nation’s immigration policies, but in many ways Teresa May was our matchmaker, the British bureaucratic apparatus a giant Rube Goldberg machine for bringing us together.
But just because we were married, the hoop-jumping didn’t stop for my wife. Even once you’re married to a British citizen, you still have to take yet more tests, spend more money, and do more applications.
This year, I’ve watched my wife studying for the “Life in the UK Test”, and fielded her questions about the Bi-Camaral Parliamentary system, Royal Assent, and Oliver Cromwell. Not a single one of the British people I know would pass the test the first or second time.
Beyond the formal exams, I’ve watched her ace that far more enjoyable test: learning a culture she wasn’t born into. Whenever I hear her explaining to non-British friends the cultural significance of the Gregg’s sausage roll and the M&S Romford TikTok account, see her laughing her way through Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, or critiquing the quality of the terrace chants in Ted Lasso, I feel a surge of absurd, unearned and genuine pride.
Watching my wife, I’ve learned second-hand something many migrants have always known: that nationality, or a sense of belonging, may be more real when it is acquired than when it is received. How can anyone born here claim someone doesn’t belong in the UK when they have had to learn what it means to be British, rather than simply being born into it?
And now, after some fifteen years of on-and-off residency, innumerable bits of paperwork, administrative hassle, law changes, nights of heartache and uncertainty, thousands of pounds of application fees, tests, and the endless indignities that are heaped upon people at passport control by probably-well-meaning officials, my wife is officially British. Or, Britzilian.
She shook hands with The Mayor of Haringey, pledged allegiance to The King - I would have sworn to God instead given that, as all Brazilians know, ‘God is Brazilian’ - and then stood by the Union Jack whilst they played the wrong national anthem, and declared her British.
She was elated. Shortly afterwards, she said ‘now I can divorce you.’
For her, a British passport means the end of walking up to border control with an English husband and Anglo-Brazilian child and a sense of humour partially shaped by Have I Got News For You only to be treated like some hostile vector here to spread pestilence through England’s green and pleasant land.
She was one of the lucky ones. We managed to make it through the gambit, and we’re university-educated middle-class people with fluent English and some disposable income at our disposal. What chance do others have? In the decade that our relationship grew and deepened, so many other people have had their shot at such things snatched from them or ground to dust.
As a nation we’ve got into the habit of subjecting those most willing to join us to endless trials-by-administrative-attrition and bureaucratic witch-dunkings. How many people limp to the end of the process having fallen out of love with a place they’ve spent huge amounts of money and countless hours trying to get to love them back?
And what else have we lost along the way?
Weep for the Lost Loves & Lays of Brexit
A recent estimate claims the the UK lost three-hundred-and-thirty thousand workers1 due to Brexit alone. It’s easy to quantify those losses of the last decade that become more tangible with each passing day: the people that left, the economic shrinkage, the lack of access to the single market, the IPOs that no longer list in London or the talent that doesn’t want to come here, the fruit and vegetables that vanish from our supermarkets and all the things that have gotten more expensive. But the biggest losses of the last decade aren’t economic or financial.
What of the romance and the friendships that never happened? What about the unlived loves and lusts?
Those people who left will have had an average of nine sexual partners and five serious relationships each. That’s almost three million foreign shags and one-and-a-half million relationships with people from less-emotionally-repressed cultures that the UK’s population has been deprived of.
I pity all those Englishmen who will never get to fall in love with Frenchwomen, all those Welsh women who will never enjoy romance with a Spaniard, all those boys from Birmingham that will never get to bang boys from Biarritz, all those people from Polzeath who will never get pegged by a Pole, and so on.
It saddens me on a personal level because years of administrative masochism have shrunk our future, and stolen from UK citizens the chance to experience the thing that has most made my life worth living.
We have robbed ourselves of the children those people might have had, the friendships they might have formed, the companies they might have started, the communities they would have built - their contributions to our creative, cultural and commercial life.
No, such things haven’t ceased to occur, but we have passed up several hundred thousand New Britons, and with them the New Britannias they would have created. Along the way we’ve lost a chance for them to do something that we’re terrible at, and outsiders are excellent at: reminding us what is special about our country and culture.
Maybe now the political winds are blowing in the right direction again, and the ship can still turn. We are a nation in an historic and prolonged economic slump, and we can and should be grasping with both hands any sources of new ideas, energy and initiative, regardless of where they might come from. At least in some corners, recognition appears to be dawning, but our schizophrenia around migrants won’t go away.
On one hand, we have the government trying to dispatch asylum seekers on deportation flights to Uganda or house them on on a Barge in Stockholm infected with Legionella Disease.
On the other hand: more recently The UK has, in poorly-managed fashion, honoured promises made to Ukrainians and people from Hong Kong looking to make a new life here, and welcomed them in. Some of these people will, perhaps, stay here temporarily. Some will make our country their home. And some of them will learn the things that I’ve learned watching my wife over the last decade.
Namely, that belonging is not just some test that you can pass, or a legal status to be given - those are material and legal conditions without which a sense of belonging can’t flourish, but they’re necessary, but not sufficient.
Belonging might be bought with golden visas, but it’s also earned through care and effort. Belonging is jokes, and memes, and laughing in a foreign language - paying such close attention to a culture from the outside that you end up on the inside of it. Belonging is coming to another country and carving out a miniature version of it with another person, and in doing so making it your own.
If you’re fortunate enough, belonging creates a world where the love of a place and the love of a person can combine, and for me that has been the stroke of entirely unearned luck that has made my life worth living.
So a belated happy Officially Britzilian day, my love. You’ve never needed a stamp in your passport to prove you belong here - not so long as there’s one piece of this country belongs to you, and always will.
And to Former Prime Minister and Home Secretary Teresa May, who is almost certainly not reading this: thank you, but also, on behalf of myself, my wife, and a great many other people - fuck you.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/17/shortfall-of-330000-workers-in-uk-due-to-brexit-say-thinktanks