Brexit blues: UK’s future is uncertain and unwritten, given the acrimony today

A few years hence, when passions have cooled somewhat and “Brexit: The Musical” hits London’s West End, the show might include a ditty that begins: “You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper — and in the middle of negotiations, you break down …”

It is purely coincidental, of course, that the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ endgame coincides with the denouement, possibly, of a saga that has dogged Britain for more than three years now. “And in the end,” Paul McCartney intones at the conclusion of the medley that took up most of the second side of Abbey Road, “the love you take is equal to the love you make”.

Those lines probably wouldn’t make it into the musical, given that love hasn’t been much in evidence during the disunited kingdom’s reckoning with posterity. Hate, in fact, has figured far more prominently on the conflicting agendas of dedicated Leavers and Remainers.

But then, hate was hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon in Britain half a century ago. Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech reflected a racism that has endured and mutated over the decades, and was arguably instrumental in the 2016 referendum. Both sides routinely dabbled in untruths in the run-up to that vote.

The result, a 52-48 majority in favour of withdrawal from the European Union (EU), was a far cry from the 1975 referendum in which a far more substantial proportion of the electorate opted to stay in what was then known as the European Economic Community (EEC), which Britain had signed up to a couple of years earlier.

Back in 1969, though, it wasn’t a member of the EEC, its bids to do so having been vetoed earlier in the decade by Charles de Gaulle, who viewed perfidious Albion, not entirely without cause, as a subsidiary of the American project. Inevitably, his doubts now tend to be seen as prescient.

On the other hand, culturally and economically, Britain was hardly cut off from the Continent in the decades leading up to its EEC accession. The Beatles, in a way, epitomised this connection. They honed their craft in Hamburg and by 1969 were quite possibly more popular in Paris and Stockholm than they were in London. They recorded German versions of a couple of their early hits, occasionally lapsed into French in their lyrics, and one of John Lennon’s contributions to the Abbey Road medley, Sun King, includes a Spanish interlude.

By arrangement with Dawn