Brexit Testimonies

"The 'English retreat' from the EU (AKA ‘Brexit’) is a triple trauma for me."

I grew up in Britain and worked for a decade in London, Bristol, Swansea, and Canterbury. I met my Swedish wife at a conference in Vienna in the 1990s and we then tried to build a life together in Britain, but it was hard. In the 2000s we took the decision to give up my job, sell the house, and move to Sweden. Sweden offered a quality of life that seemed impossible in Britain – better childcare and schooling, more available housing, plus a community of family and friends.

My first job was in Malmö, but for the last decade I have worked in Copenhagen, commuting across the Öresund crossing that my dad had helped build in the 1990s. Copenhagen is a human-scale city – ranked as one of the most livable cities in the world. As a capital city of an EU member state it has many benefits, not least its openness to international employees. The Öresund bridge, made famous by the TV series ‘The Bridge’, was part-funded by the EU and built by a consortia of Swedish, Danish, German, Dutch and British companies to connect together EU member states Sweden and Denmark.

Becoming Swedish has been a long process, helped by having Swedish friends and family, but hindered by working in Denmark. Having bilingual/binational children both complicates and enriches our lives, with family now spread across Europe. Swedes take family life and leisure time very seriously indeed, which combined with good equality in the workplace goes someway to explain their high levels of productivity and wellbeing. I took the picture at about 11 o’clock on ‘midsommer’ night, the longest day and huge celebration of Swedish summer usually involving lots of singing, eating, and drinking with family and friends.

Learning Swedish has been a challenge – it is relatively easy to learn, but difficult to speak – because most Swedes insist on speaking English to you! In 2013 I met and publicly debated the Conservative government’s plans for EU renegotiation and referendum with David Lidington, the British Minister for Europe. Immediately after hearing from him how clueless the British government were, and fearful of the rise of the far-right party the ‘Swedish Democrats’, I became a Swedish citizen in two weeks.

The ‘English retreat’ from the EU (AKA ‘Brexit’) is a triple trauma for me. First, there is the loss of being ‘orphaned’ from my homeland as it breaks from the rest of Europe, and the imposition of inevitable restrictions on movement and rights. Second, there is the angst of transborder commuting – non-EU citizens cannot get a social security number and do not have the automatic right to work in Denmark if they are non-resident. Finally, and most painfully, as a publicly-funded EU researcher I can see on the near-horizon the disastrous effects of leaving the EU on the decline of Britain’s overwhelmingly service economy; on perilous social cohesion in the EU’s most unequal society; and on the fragmenting countries of the disuniting kingdom.