04 Jul 2008
Those immigrants...
I am ashamed to
say that I didn’t give the Lisbon treaty much thought before the referendum,
but as I didn’t have a vote, I felt excused from trying to make sense of the
blasted thing. I looked at the mug shots of the representatives our main
parties – Enda Kenny looking like a bent accountant, Brian Cowan whom, thanks
to Martyn Turner, I can never see without a fag coming out of his ear – and
thought, what an unconvincing shower. The Shinners seemed to have abandoned
realpolitik in suggesting we could negotiate a better a deal, but more worrying
was the crowd they’d hooked up with – the conspiracy theorists like Jim Corr,
the lads who thought the EU was going to introduce compulsory abortion and gay
marriage and the anti-immigrationists. My default political rule kicked in: my
enemy’s friend is my enemy. it would have had to be a ‘Yes’, so.
But I don’t have
a vote, and that’s because I’m an immigrant myself, although I’ve been here so
long that the land of my birth has grown away without me, and seems strange and
foreign. Although I am sentimentally proud of being a Londoner – feeling, like
St Paul, that ‘I am a citizen of no mean city’, and always enjoying a visit to
its fleshpots – it is not my home town any more. I have got to the stage where
I take wrong turnings, and I can’t remember what was there before the new
buildings went up. Most importantly, people don’t sound the same. And they seem to think some
very odd things. I am resigned to being a sort of national mongrel.
There was one
post-mortem letter in the Trib which really took my breath away. It was from an Irishman called Peter
Raber, who said, “We voted against Lisbon for many reasons… we do not want a
European constitution… and we are very concerned about immigration. We know the
benefits we have derived from Europe, but we have been good to Europe too: we
have taken in all those immigrants.” The man lives in Salzburg – an immigrant himself, presumably.
Well, now that
government mismanagement and world economic factors have driven us into
recession, he need worry no more. The Poles are packing up to go home, as
Poland is booming while we go down the pan, and no doubt many of our own will
be following them, as we become a country of net emigration once more. Let’s
hope things aren’t as bad as in the 80s, when so many left school to get on the
next boat. And let’s hope that the countries they’re going to don’t feel the
same as Mr Raber.