Reflections on Brexit

The Eastern European connection which contributed to the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU.

I realise I am probably late to the party talking about Brexit - that was so last week’s news. However, my ideas take time to marinate and put into writing.

By now, we all know the machinery of how this vote was engineered - Steve Bannon and the American nationalists who wanted to prise their cousins loose from continental Europe, opportunistic British political elites that evaded responsibility for their own failures by manufacturing a new enemy. We know about Cambridge Analytica and its psychographic profiling. We know about the Kremlin’s bot farms, amplifying whatever content would nudge a few hundred thousand marginal voters in the right direction. And ten years later, we now know the consequences. The trade friction, the productivity drag, and the irony that immigration did not fall after Brexit, but rose. It simply stopped arriving from Warsaw and started arriving from Lagos.

I am not here to relitigate any of that. Better economists and sharper journalists have already done the forensics, and done it better than I ever could. I am here for something subtler, and I think more important: the cultural collision that broke the British mind and planted the seeds of a once-in-a-generation mistake. This is the part of the story that requires a particular vantage point to see clearly - and, as it happens, I have it.

Disclaimer: Before someone descends into the comments armed with points, let me get ahead of you.

Yes, I am well aware of the shortcomings of the European Union. I know about the over-regulation, the Brussels directives on the curvature of bananas. I know about shared waters and fishing rights, which is precisely why a country like Iceland - where fishing is a pillar of the national economy - keeps the EU at arm’s length. I know that immigration puts real strain on housing, on the NHS, on school places and GP waiting lists. I know that among any large inflow of people there will be criminal elements, because there always are. I know, and I sympathise, with people feeling like their own cities are not theirs anymore. And I know that the picture I am about to paint does not apply to all Britons, any more than it applies to all Eastern Europeans.

I am working with averages here.

The grievances were real. Many of the talking points that drove the Leave vote sat on top of genuine, felt, legitimate frustration. I am not going to spend this essay pretending otherwise, nor am I going to spend it excavating those grievances in detail - a hundred analysts have already done that, and most of them have done it better than I could, because it is not my angle. My angle is the one almost nobody covers, because most are simply not positioned to.

Always the Balkan candor, as promised.

Understanding the British mind

It took me a very long time to piece this particular puzzle together, and I had a head start.

I grew up in a fiercely Anglophile household. I was watching Monty Python before I could speak a word of English - my older brother, already fluent, translating the sketches in real time and explaining the intricacies of British humour to my childish brain. I read English literature and WWII British history. I absorbed the popular culture and by the time I actually met Britons in real life, and started visiting, I thought I understood the country.

I did not, of course (in my defence, I was young and as all young people - I was arrogant enough to believe I know it all). You cannot understand a culture from its exports, you need first hand experience with it to truly grasp its’ intricacies.

As my real-life education began, I was very surprised to learn that the former colonies, however different - in colour, culture and creed - were always legible to the British mind. Eastern Europe, however, was not - it came as a shock to me, because I assumed we all occupied a similar cultural space. I thought that I, as a Bulgarian, have a lot more in common with your average Englishman than someone from Pakistan or Nigeria, because we came from the same continent, cultural, and even civilisational context.

In reality, since Eastern Europe was never part of the British empire, we didn’t quite fit the established hierarchy. So when we arrived - suddenly, in numbers, and refusing to behave the way the hierarchy expected - something in the collective British psyche simply could not process it, and the system threw an error.

The imperial filing system

Britain is an island, and islands are, by default, more homogeneous than continental states that share long land borders with a dozen neighbours. So when the Windrush generation began arriving from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971, filling the labour shortages of a country that had bombed and bled itself half to death, it was the first genuine shock to British society on the question of migration. Faces that looked different, voices that sounded different, customs that were different, arriving in visible numbers on the very shores that have kept them save from invaders.

But that shock was somewhat absorbed, and it was absorbed for a reason that Britons rarely say out loud, because it is not flattering: these were people from the empire. From lands Britain had governed, mapped and taxed. The average Briton had at least a vague mental image of a Jamaican, a Pakistani, a Nigerian - because these were, until recently, ours. They came, they filled the unglamorous jobs, they built the roads and cleaned the wards and drove the buses, and the hierarchy had a slot ready for them: the bottom rung, the service class. While I understand that this is not a politically correct thing to describe, it is, however, simply what happened. The first generation started at the bottom, as the system expected, and the more complicated, more dynamic story of the second and third generations came later.

The point is that the empire came with a filing system where evert colonial subject had a folder, and the British mind knew where to put them.

Then the European Union arrived, and Britain was suddenly filled with a type of immigrant it had no folder for.

Not the Spaniard or the Portuguese - those, Europe-facing Britain knew. I mean Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, etc. A whole quadrant of the continent the average Briton had spent precisely zero seconds thinking about. I remember the early 2010s vividly, because a friend of mine, a software engineer, was interviewed by The Guardian when he arrived in London. Ironically, he left one of the most successful tech companies in Bulgaria, and when you did all the accounting - fiscally - he wasn’t better off in London than he was in Sofia. But I vividly remember the panic, and the panic was real. And within a few years, Britons were meeting the famously unsmiling faces of Eastern Europe everywhere: the Pole fixing the roof and the plumbing, the Romanian nurse taking the blood pressure, the Bulgarian bent double in a strawberry field. But also - and this is the part that broke the code - the Eastern European software engineer, the architect, the financial analyst in London. That was not supposed to happen.

To understand why that broke something, you have to understand two things at once: what was in the Eastern European’s head, and what was in the Briton’s.

A short story from a tax office

Let me (re)tell you a story, because it does most of the legwork of my argument here.

There is a Bulgarian journalist - competent, fiery, zero filter and a mouth that can run for a decade without stopping - who emigrated to Britain like 15 years ago. She did her PhD at Oxford. Early in her working life, as a side gig, she edited the final theses of Oxford’s international students, and being of the conscientious sort, she went down to the local tax office to declare the freelance income and pay what she owed to the state.

This was around 2010-ish, if not later. A few years after Bulgaria had joined the EU, with rights to travel and work in the United Kingdom.

The officer was baffled, and he asked for her visa. She explained, patiently, that she did not need one - she was an EU citizen now. Back and forth they went, him insisting, her explaining, until a supervisor was summoned to settle it. The supervisor checked - she was right, no visa required.

But the story does not end there. She explained her work - professional editing for Oxford students. And the supervisor, wrestling with a passport full of unfamiliar, non-Latin letters and a lack of proper procedure for a freelance editor, said the thing that told me more about the average British mindset than any book I have ever read. He said: most of the Bulgarian women he had heard of did cleaning. Wouldn’t she prefer to do cleaning instead? It would be so much easier to process the paperwork for cleaning.

She was, as per her own words, eventually escorted from the building by security, having lost her temper.

Now, we Balkan people are not celebrated for our composure, and I will grant that. But I cannot fault her. Picture it - you graduate with a doctorate from the oldest university in the English-speaking world, you attempt to pay tax to the British state, on the strength of your professional skill in the British national language, and you are asked, sincerely and helpfully, whether you might not rather go and scrub toilets.

That is the whole argument in one anecdote. The British mind had a folder marked Bulgarian woman, and the folder said cleaner. When reality did not fit the folder, reality was the problem, not the folder.

Understanding the Eastern European mind

So what was in her head - and in the heads of the millions who came?

Here is the thing Western Europe has never fully grasped about the East. We have a long, intimate, unchosen relationship with poverty. Not because we lacked ability to be prosperous, but because we spent centuries under the most retrograde empires around - namely, the Ottomans and the Russians - that were, to put it charitably, allergic to prosperity and hostile to our upward mobility. They looted the present and mortgaged the future. What they never managed to kill was the ambition that people had to lead a more prosperous life, like their Western counterparts.

Look at what a Bulgarian farmer did the moment liberation from the Ottomans gave him a little breathing room and a bit of surplus: he sent his children to study in Vienna. And after the Berlin Wall came down and the communist regimes rotted through, that same instinct detonated at an even larger scale. Anyone with the risk appetite and the blind, unreasonable ambition to try - ran. We still do not know, precisely, how many millions in human capital we lost in that exodus. Many went to the United States, because the hustle was never foreign to us; we had simply been forbidden from practising it for centuries, and the hunger for it had compounded like a credit card interest.

Truth is - people just refused to be poor. They fought for the right to chase prosperity, and they were willing to pay an obscene price for it. An engineer would pick fruit in England or California. An accountant would care for elderly Germans or Italians. A doctor, who’s Eastern European diploma was not recognised back then, would empty clean hotel rooms 10 hours a day, as long as it bought her children a future she had been denied. The Bulgarian mechanic who fled to Germany in 1997 supervises that workshop today - or, more likely, owns the one across the road.

I am not painting a fairy tale about Eastern European diaspora - not everyone made it. Plenty worked a few hard years, saved what they could, and came home to tend a garden or an ageing parent. Some failed outright. The successful Eastern European diaspora is not a universal story, and I will not pretend it is. But there is something universal in it, and it is this: the flat, absolute refusal to accept poverty as a fate, and the willingness to out-work anyone standing between you and the way out.

And that is what the average Briton was not braced for. Because the first generation of Caribbean, Indian and African immigrants had, broadly, arrived and taken the rung they were assigned on arrival. Nobody in Britain had built an emotional model for the immigrant who took the bottom rung as a starting position and started sprinting, or worse yet - the immigrant who didn’t get into the assigned rung at all, but graduated from Oxford and started editing the national language of the most recent, powerful empire known in human history.

The breaking point

In all fairness, the Brits had a point.

Watching a foreigner outperform you is unpleasant in any country. If you are a mid-level employee and someone who arrived with nothing - someone who speaks your language with a thick, difficult to comprehend accent, went to a shitty school, and owns nothing but a rotting flat in a communist tower block in a dying town - climbs past you, on your own soil, in your own backyard, a certain annoyance, and even suspicion, is simply inevitable. That is not a British defect, that is just human nature. If it’s just a one or two examples - that’s great, you might actually be happy about them and retell their story as a success. But when too many immigrants in your own neighbourhood have two jobs, while you struggle to find even one - it becomes a problem.

All this lands harder, much harder, when your national identity is built on the quiet and polite assumption of exceptionalism. When some part of you believes, even subconsciously, that you are the reference point against which other nations are measured.

And from that cracked worldview, the rest follows almost automatically. It becomes very easy to believe that these people are here to take - to flood the labour market, to undercut wages, to lift good jobs out of hardworking British hands. You will likely not go looking for the research on labour shortages, nor will you volunteer for the seasonal fruit-picking that the Romanians are doing 10 hours a day / 6 days a week. It is not a conclusion you reason your way to, it is just a feeling you get, standing in a queue, hearing a dozen languages you cannot place, watching faces that do not fit, and observing your hometown changing into something you can no longer recognise.

It did not help that Britain knew, and cared to know, almost nothing about Eastern Europe. In the early 2000s, The Guardian was still printing Stalinist-era names for Eastern European cities, because its databases had not been updated since the Iron Curtain and no one had thought it worth the bother. And why would they? Who in Britain was thinking about Eastern Europe before we turned up on the doorstep?

2008, and the death of the good years

For decades, the Western world enjoyed something historically abnormal: a rising standard of living, handed down reliably from one generation to the next. Then 2008 came, and it did not dent that arrangement - it ended it, and the echo is still felt today.

The average Western worker has spent the years since feeling something their parents never felt: the sensation of getting poorer as time passes, not richer. Wages stagnated. House prices detached from reality. Inflation ballooned. The lifestyle that was simply the default setting before 2008 quietly became a luxury, and a whole class of people who had done nothing wrong watched their expected future evaporate.

At the same time, globalisation began collapsing under its own weight.

We have a saying back home: too much good is not good.

Like anything in life - food, wine, sex - a thing can be genuinely wonderful right up until there is too much of it, at which point it turns on you. Globalisation was a real good. It was a real good while a manageable number of people moved from point A to point B. But push the flow past a certain threshold and it starts breaking things on both ends. The West felt swamped, overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and it did not much matter how productive those numbers were. Meanwhile the East hollowed out. The doctors, the nurses, the engineers, the electricians all left, and the countries they left behind were gutted of the very people who might have rebuilt them.

The Balkans emptied out. Growing up, I watched German recruiters walk into a regional hospital and walk out with signed contracts for a third of the staff.

That is what the other end of “uncontrolled immigration” looks like: for you, it may look like an invasion, but for us - it was an amputation.

So, following the 2008 crisis, the wealth of millions of ordinary people was destroyed, and a generation was quietly sentenced to a lower standard of living than their parents. And when that happens, the resulting rage has really only two places to go. It can point up, at the wealthy. Or it can point down, at the immigrant.

Guess which one the powerful preferred.

The oldest trick

When crisis hits, there are basically two options that most societies go for as a scapegoat: the rich or the foreign.

Immigrants do not donate millions to political campaigns - the same politicians and financiers who actually engineered the crisis do - and were, incidentally, just as culpable as the cocaine-addicted investment bankers who placed the bets that broke the world economy. So the anger of the demos had to be redirected, away from the people who caused the damage and towards the people who could not fight back.

And it is so much easier to convince a frightened, poorer citizen that his decline is the fault of the Romanian picking strawberries than the fault of the corrupt and incompetent elites he keeps electing. The immigrant explanation has a second, sweeter advantage: it is exculpatory. It is not your fault for voting badly, year after year. It is not the system’s fault. It is their fault. You were not duped; you are a victim. Who would not prefer that story?

So when the British public got angry - and they were right to be angry - David Cameron, in a last-ditch bid to save his own political skin, offered them the ultimate version of that story. He took the entire failure of the British state to protect its citizens’ wealth from the casino he had helped deregulate, and he exported it wholesale to Brussels. Your stagnant wages, your crumbling high street, your unaffordable house, your creaking hospital - Brussels did this to you.

We all know how that turned out.

The NHS was not saved. In the two years around the referendum, the number of European nurses joining the UK register fell by 91% - from tens of thousands a year to a few hundred. Nearly half of the EU nurses who left and gave a reason cited Brexit directly. A study out of Surrey later estimated that the resulting loss of experienced nursing staff was associated with roughly 1500 additional patient deaths a year in the period after the vote.

The bitter pill

For the average Leave voter, now watching larger immigration waves arrive from regions far more foreign than Romania or Bulgaria ever were, this is a very hard pill to swallow. Because swallowing it requires the one thing human beings resist most fiercely: admitting you were played.

Nobody likes to feel like a fool. It is precisely why people so rarely report being scammed - not because the loss is small, but because the embarrassment is enormous. To go to the police is to say, out loud, I believed something absurd, and it cost me. Most people would rather absorb the loss in silence than face the shame of admitting they were scammed, regardless of how talented the scammer. And Brexit was a scam of exactly that shape: a promise that felt true, sold by people who knew it wasn’t, to people who had been made poor by those very sellers.

So when the introspection does not come, the story simply mutates. The problem was never whether to blame the outsider; it was only ever which outsider. First it was us - Eastern Europeans. Now it is…well, everyone else. Suddenly, we were the productive and more culturally compatible guest workers, while the new imports are not.

The purpose of Brexit

If you ignore the mechanisms that made it all possible - the Bannons, the data mining firms, the bot farms - and Brexit reduces to a single, ancient political manoeuvre. It nationalised the successes and exported the failures. Everything that had gone right in Britain remained gloriously, sovereignly British. Everything that had gone wrong was rebranded, packaged, and shipped to Brussels.

Were the grievances legitimate? Yes. Genuinely, they were. Did they merit this solution? No. Brexit did not raise your wages, it did not make British business (especially SMBs) more competitive, it did not stop the migration - it changed its composition and, on the numbers, increased its volume. It did not fix a single one of the wounds that 2008 had opened. It simply gave a wronged public the emotional satisfaction of blaming a foreigner they had never bothered to understand, and charged them the GDP of a mid-sized country for it.

I am old enough to remember when Poles in Britain were something to be sneered at. Today, Poland’s income per capita has now reached roughly 90% of Britain’s in purchasing-power terms and is closing the gap every single year. Its unemployment sits near 2.5% while Britain’s productivity languishes at the bottom of the G7. On current trends the forecasters expect Poland to pull level within the decade. Not to mention that the migration is beginning to run the other way - Poles returning to Poland.

The irony of it never stops amazing me. The country that voted to take back control has less of it than it did. The country it looked down on is on its way to surpass it. And the strawberry pickers, the roofers, the nurses - the people whose ambition the British mind could not file - mostly did exactly what they came to do. They refused poverty. They climbed the ladder from the bottom of the barrel, and a good number of them climbed all the way back home after Brexit, leaving the jobs they ones occupied legally to be filled by quasi-legal immigrants from non-European countries, imported by shady recruitment agencies.

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The Balkan Candor

If you are British and you have read this far without closing the tab and hitting block on my profile, you have my respect.

I’d like to tell you one thing though - you were not stupid. That is the part the smug Remainer commentary has always got wrong, and it is why it never persuaded anyone. Your anger was real, your losses were real, and the people who told you the EU was the source of your pain were not entirely lying - Brussels is genuinely maddening, and mass movement of people genuinely strains a society. You were not wrong to be furious.

You were wrong, however, about where to aim. And you were wrong in a way that is deeply, forgivably human, because someone with a great deal of money and a very sophisticated understanding of your fear made absolutely certain you aimed sideways instead of up. They knew you would rather blame a stranger than a system, because we all would.

The Eastern European was never your real problem. The Eastern European was the person who arrived as a fully-fledged working adult - one that your taxes didn’t have to raise from a toddler with government-funded schools, lunches and healthcare. Many came from nothing and with nothing, took the job you did not want, paid into the system and kept it to themselves. Such people, if anything, are the clearest available evidence of what ambition can do when a society is smart enough to let it happen.

And now, unfortunately, you are about to learn what Eastern Europeans learned a long time ago: political mistakes can take decades to fully reveal their consequences, and just as long to undo.