It's a Wonderful Brexit?: Tales from an American Itinerant Farm Volunteer in Britian

By Eric Vanderrama

The UK has done it. They have invoked Article 50 and started the two-year-long process of leaving the European Union. Instead of making amendments to Brexit that would have allowed EU citizens to stay in Britain and their own citizens to remain in Europe, they decided to use the reciprocity of these millions of people as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations with Europe. Leave voters forced everyone to gamble everything, while hoping that Europe will bow down to their every demand. They likely did not realize how Brexit would affect nearly every facet of their lives. Soon, when the actual outcomes of Brexit become clearer, many surprises await them.

Instead of taking such a complicated situation as Brexit on all at once, I will regale you with my experiences as a vendor at the Chester Christmas Market, a market where often neither the products sold nor the people selling them were British. As an American involved in this Christmas market, I could not help to think about a Christmas classic from my homeland, It's a Wonderful Life. For anyone who has somehow missed it, the film is a dark Christmas fable where everyman George Bailey from the idyllic small-town of Bedford Falls contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve, but is saved by a guardian angel who shows George how his actions protected his town from Mr. Potter whose greed would transform it into something entirely different-- a monopolistic dystopia called Pottersville. I began to wonder if it would be a wonderful Brexit. I wondered how even the few city blocks like those of the Chester Christmas market change without non-British products and people, resulting from a hard Brexit? Would it remain Bedford Falls or would it degenerate into a Pottersville? I further realized that the leave and and remain voters could not even agree on who exactly was the protagonist, George Bailey, and who was Mr. Potter, the antagonist.

Walking through the Chester Christmas Market showed how un-British this British Christmas market really was. First of all, the idea behind such Christmas markets belongs to Germany, not Britain. The busiest stalls sold prepared foods, which were staffed by Italians and Spaniards, whose tan skin and violent shivering bespoke of balmy Mediterranean origins. They sold everything from Nutella pancakes to American-style hamburgers, to Colombian coffee laced with French Cognac. The stall to our right was staffed by a surly British lady who sold a horrible mish mash of Chinese made tchotchkes that ranged from faux-American “dream-catchers” to poop emoji plushies, which all should have been Brexited long ago.

Her neighbor was a Dutch hipster lothario who used his charming smile to sell Spanish garlic graters to the usually ‘invisible’ 50-year-old female British set. Across from our stall, a sausage man with a thick German accent would incessantly shout “no soya, starches, or fillers... in Bavaria we don’t do funny business.” Customers seemed overjoyed to learn that their Debreceners were made in Bavaria and not Britain. They eagerly scooped up these insipid industrial links, seemingly because they came in bicep-building quantities and with a free plastic bag all for a tenner. When one little boy yelled “These smell like dog food,” the chorizo man said without missing a beat, “Well, dogs love them!”

Like the German sausage man, our accents betrayed us. Many of our customers were less than discreet and would often yell out, “But you’re not British!” because we were Americans selling British artisanal products made by British citizens. In the post-Brexit world, they already were policing their borders and bluntly critiquing all that was not British. I cannot imagine the same words being uttered at a pair of boots made in India but sold at Mark & Spencers.

Many would-be British customers professed loving the sampled products made on a family owned and operated Organic farm, until they saw the price tag. They would tell us instead they would be buying a mass-produced Asda cheese variety pack for half the price. They loved the idea of products made in Britain, until the price was actually remunerative to the British people making them and more costly to them. On the other hand, a global customer base found the prices fair. We sold cheese and spirits to many tourists, including Brazilians, French, Ecuadorians, Indians, Dutch, Americans, Spaniards and of course British as well.

With a hard Brexit now a reality one must now imagine a future Chester Christmas Market without this diverse international clientele, its German sausage vendor and sausages, vociferous Americans selling artisanal Organic gin, handsome Dutch lotharios and polyglot Italian food venders. Without them, there hardly would have been a Christmas market at all last year. Yet the leave voters must deny any positive contributions by non-Brits. For leavers, anything from Europe or elsewhere must be treated with great suspicion if not derision.

Beyond your ordinary xenophobia, there seems to be another kind of delusional thinking fueling Brexit. Evidently, leavers assume that somehow British people will seamlessly step in to make these products and sell them in their own stalls, all at big box chain store low prices. Somehow people will get paid more while the cost of goods and services will decline. Supposedly, there is pent up and untapped entrepreneurial spirit and artisanal skill that ‘evil’ Europe and Europeans are somehow suffocating. Only once this supposed dead weight is removed, will they put the “great” back in Great Britain. The Chester Christmas Market suggests otherwise. Brits had just as much right to make products and have a stall at the market as did non-Brits, though they were clearly not taking advantage of it. How they will somehow be caught by a newfound entrepreneurial spirit post-Brexit was best left unexplained by leavers.

It is distressing that Brexit is in effect pulling a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life and doubling down on what would happen if millions of people had to leave. Instead of affirming the contributions of the ordinary non-British person, they are willing to let George Bailey metaphorically drown as millions of people may have to leave Britain if they curtail reciprocal freedom of movement between the UK and the EU. They are like Mr. Potter yelling at George Bailey to disappear so that they can take over. It is sad that they need to create a tight monopoly over their labor market just so it can be finally fit their rigid definition of what is “British”.

If the Chester Christmas Market is any indication, the UK seems to be careening towards Pottersville. These international vendors and customers were not the enemy. Instead they were like George Bailey, saving Britain from a boring and monotone dystopia. Vendors sat in the cold for 31 straight days and brought life to a market that was staffed mainly by non-Brits. Non-British customers bought products made by Brits and non-Brits. Yet these contributions were still somehow off-putting to leave voters whose perverse version of Britishness has thrown the lives of these hard workers into greater precarity. They have strengthened their grips on a monopoly for British jobs, irrespective if British people actually have the skills to staff them. With such Mr. Potter-like greed and callousness it is impossible to hope that it’s a wonderful Brexit.

The Dangers of Defending a Singular “Frenchness”

By Eric Van Vleet

The journalist/writer Adam Nossitier recently published an essay in the New York Times that is incendiary to anyone who loves rural France. The title states his case well enough: “As France’s Towns Wither, Fears of a Decline in ‘Frenchness’”. Nossitier focuses particularly on the town of Albi, which has a population of 49,000 and is located in the département of Tarn about an hour northeast of Toulouse. It is a beautiful town. The historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, home to the grandiose Sainte-Cécile Cathedral and also the well-done Toulouse-Lautrec museum. Such attractions make Albi a prime tourist destination. But attracting tourists is not Albi’s main issue, according to Nossitier.

Nossitier describes its “withering” as the continuous closure of businesses in its historic center. He had been to Albi decades before and found it thriving, but upon his return this January, he found it to be “withering”. While clothing stores and shops selling tourist goods remain open, bakeries, grocers, butcher shops and cafes have closed in the town center. It is these closures, which Nossitier argues indicate a declining ‘Frenchness’. These shops acted as spaces for people to meet and exchange gossip. Vacant stores and dwellings further corrode community ties and the ‘vitality’ of the town is lost in these processes of “devitalization”.

Albi is not the only town “withering”, according to Nossitier, but many other “provincial” towns throughout France are experiencing the same phenomenon. He makes the bolder claim that this “withering” makes voters in such places all the more willing to support the extreme-right Front National  party and its candidate Marine Le Pen in the upcoming election even when they previously voted for left-wing or centrist candidates. He says that Le Pen claims that she can defend not only France, but “Frenchness”. Such appeals by Le Pen to some static notion of “Frenchness” are troubling. For Americans, we can hear some echoes of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” with a French twist. Each make campaign promises not to diverse groups of people living in large urban centers, but people in smaller towns with predominantly white populations that have faced long-term economic decline and yet fear change like immigration.

Nossitier argues that the opening of big box stores spurred processes of “devitalization” in Albi, which began during France’s Trente Glorieuses (a period  of peak economic vitality and prosperity from 1945-1975). Instead of supporting downtown local grocers and other businesses, people used their increasing incomes to shop instead at chain big box stores that offered more choices at lower prices but little in the way of community. Competition from these suburban big boxes drained downtown businesses of their customers in Albi and similar French towns. The havoc that Wal-Mart has wrought on many American small towns is not dissimilar.

The same broad narrative fits the town of Cahors, which is a small provincial capital an hour north of Toulouse and an hour and a half from Albi, where Lili and I have been living in France. There is a street filled with former merchants’ buildings where at best 20% of the businesses remain open. In other parts of old town Cahors there are still are bakeries, butcher shops, cafes and grocers. The city only really comes alive on Wednesday and Saturday markets. Even if it has fared better than Albi as it has multiple bakeries and butcher shops, Cahors can appear to be “withering”, especially on Sundays and Mondays.

While clearly business closures and the sprouting up of chain big box stores are not favorable trends for Cahors or Albi, and should be combatted, the concept of “devitalization” is a lot more complicated than Nossitier claims. Again Cahors is vital on market days. Many businesses depend on these days for their earnings. Business is also highly seasonal. Shops seem to make their entire year during the summer. Therefore on a market day in August, Cahors is anything but “devitalized”. Business cycles are far more varied than in large cities like Paris.

Nositier fits all of this talk of “withering” and “devitalization” in the context of a potential rightward political swerve for such places.The big questions this article raises for France in an election year is if one must choose between this kind of “withering” “Frenchness” of today or that of the “vital” past. Yet such a choice is unrealistic, just as unrealistic as returning the America the great to the 1950s as Trump wishes. Nossitier nostalgically wishes that Albi could return to the city as it was on his first visit, vital in the midst of its economic “glorious years” before chain stores and suburbanization. If only this is the sole inflexible version of “Frenchness”, then there is no doubt why it is “withering”. There seems to be little political possibilities in such a narrow definition of Frenchness that wants to turn back the clock. Few if any places are still experiencing such rapid economic growth or are free of suburbanization or chain stores. Rolling back such sustained macro-economic trends is ambitious and admirable as a continued political project, but likely of little electoral practicality in the short-term.

Instead of hoping for the return of some ideal “Frenchness” that is “withering”, change is not so simple or somehow resoundingly negative. No doubt “Frenchness” may be in part composed of artisanal bakeries, local butcher shops and locally-owned cafes all located in a walkable, historic city center. As well, it is an increasingly multicultural society in large urban areas, just as it is in the housing blocks outside small and large French cities where people have comparatively fewer opportunities and higher rates of employment than in old town Albi.

Yet “Frenchness” is even more than that. It can be a life organized around twice weekly market days, alternating with days without shopping. It is the land of the 35 hour work week  that people have fought to defend as well as their universal socialized medicine. Firing and hiring people is complicated. France has half as many people living below the poverty line than in the US but double the unemployment. France provides its citizens with relative stability compared to the US, a quality of life that is likely far better than having more diverse shopping outlets that have extended hours.

The kind of pessimism and obsession with a “withering” national identity as expressed by Nossitier, Le Pen and Trump seems to be running rampant. Politicians need to censure Marine Le Pen’s race-baiting, and instead demand equality that brings the aforementioned benefits to all French people in large cities as well as in the provinces. It is a glorious country that does not need ‘defending’ from outsiders nor is it in some state of imminent “withering”. There is work to be done to be sure, but there is so much that is glorious and thriving even in places like Albi and Cahors. Instead of falling under the spell of a Le Pen that France is in need of some kind of anti-Europe savoir, there are viable left-wing candidates with a far more vision and expansive ideas of “Frenchness”. France would far more likely to be “devitalized” the more narrow “Frenchness” is defined and the more people are convinced their wonderful country is in an inexorable state of “withering”.