Please Minister, can we have our lives back?
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“Get Brexit Done.” Three words which, with the unmistakeable brusquerie of Cummings, well sum up the electorate’s collective fatigue. Wherever you stand on the issue of Brexit, one thing is for certain: the last three and half years since the referendum have been a truly spectacular waste of civic time.
Yes, the failures of leadership, the derelictions of duty are all too obvious to rehearse. But almost nothing is said about how much of our daily lives we, as citizens, have been forced to squander in the cacophonous caterwaul of the Brexit brouhaha.
“Well, this issue really matters.” It does, yes. But does a periodic realignment of our relationship with a political and economic union really deserve to be treated as the most important peacetime issue since universal franchise? At any rate, the obviously high stakes, when mixed into the grim cocktail of political obfuscation, ever-moving deadlines and institutional grandstanding, are taking a serious toll on the British people at large.
But there is an upside. So forget the masochistic economic forecasts, disregard the histrionic body-paint and leave be the green-ink letters to the Guardian. Instead, I wager that the swiftest and most tangible “Brexit Bounce” will be a human one: regaining the mental bandwidth to talk, to read, to think about — and to do — all manner of other, more constructive things.
Just consider the numbers. Let’s be merciful and spare the children, focusing instead on the 50 million or so British citizens over sixteen. How much time, do you suppose, we’ve spent digesting and debating Brexit, whether poring over the specifics, or railing in general at the shambolic state of it all?
At the lowest end, it’s hard to imagine less than half an hour per week: a conversation here, a TV or radio report there, and the inevitable Facebook frothing. At the top, there will be plenty of hitherto-normal folk who, despite their jobs having nothing to do with post-Brexit planning, are clocking up several hours every day.
It’s plausible enough, then, that for the average Briton three or so hours are taken up each week by active or passive Brexitophagy. And that this has been the case for the last three years and nine months, since Dave announced the referendum date in February 2016.
Once crunched, these figures get frightening. The adult population of Britain has devoted something in the region of — breathe now — 29,250,000,000 hours to the cause. The best part of thirty billion hours will give you some 3,336,756 years to chew it over. In other words, we have been collectively contemplating Brexit since the Piacenzian age of the Pliocene epoch. By each cogitating Brexit for a full month of our waking lives, Brits have thought about Brexit for more than six times longer than homo sapiens has walked the earth, and would have already chalked up half a million years before the entire genus homo even emerged.
What else can be done in such a time frame, you may fairly wonder? We could have sent a shuttle to Pluto and back 70,000 times. Or travelled to the very edge of our entire galaxy 30-odd times. Every book ever printed in any language could have been read — and then reread 200 times over. Every 18-year-old Brit could have completed a relay-walk around the world for their Duke of Edinburgh Platinum Award. Every human currently alive on the present planet could have sat through their own private performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser — and had time for more than one interval ice cream.
Yes, these are silly numbers sillily applied. But consider the individual case. Suppose that each person had spent just half of this wodge of time with Brexit on the mind. That would have freed up for each a month of waking hours to pursue something that genuinely rewarded and inspired the Brexit-unbound citizen. OK, without any prescient focus, much of this available time would have simply been diverted to idle screen-swiping, trivial gossip or the warm embrace of sleep.
But, once we at last get beyond our present stasis, the liberation of several hours a week to think or do anything other than emotionally-draining Brexit-fretting will surely have one of two effects. Either we channel that reclaimed time into a similarly enervating, depressing and unproductive cul-de-sac, or we gain a spring in our step by viewing the world once more in its usual colours. If the latter does come through, the assured upsurge in office productivity, to say nothing of mental wellbeing, should please those who must weigh the outcome of Brexit in cold pounds.
We hear now and then that there’s a benefit to all this collective cogitation — that the country’s engagement with politics has increased markedly. Perhaps so. But this has come about alongside a stark polarisation of opinion, and uncharitable dismissal of any dissenting view. Some will loftily declare that only by spending such time on such a topic did we successfully attain the Knowledge Of What We Know Now. That is self-serving nonsense.
Take the non-existent person who switched off from Brexit discussions the day after the 2016 referendum: really what would he or she have lost by returning to the news only now, in late November 2019? Here we find ourselves, still on the verge of a compromise withdrawal agreement, before any formal discussion of how we should engage with Europe and the world at large for the years and decades to come.
Well, I will level with you. Just like those paid professionally to pontificate on the matter, I haven’t the faintest idea about how Britain’s economy will fare after Brexit. But whatever happens in the next few months and years, we can be certain that the official judgment of its success or failure will be made squarely on economic grounds. Yet such a myopic calculation overlooks entirely the nation’s collective squandering of time and energy. Judged by the historian’s pragmatic yardstick, the last 45 months have been pathetically empty, a vapid sump of inconsequential words and deeds.
If Parliament should manage somehow to “get Brexit done”, at least we can do something else. If Brexit can bring us any benefit from day zero, let it be for the normal citizen to leave behind the years of debate, of reportage, of public squabble, of inveterate whining, of stubborn heel-digging, and of being distracted from every other possible thing that we would be much happier and much healthier doing.
