About to Be Lanced

Awa Mahdawi writes that she receives nasty comments these days:

"Go back home to your third-world country,” a helpful stranger told me on Twitter recently. I get comments like this a lot, often appended with a witty comment about my name. Normally they don’t bother me. But this particular jibe was just after Christmas and it hit a nerve because, guess what? I’d love to go back home to England. I live in New York and it’s been more than a year since I’ve seen my family and friends in London. Part of me feels homesick, but the other part of me isn’t sure what I’m actually homesick for. When I read the news about Britain, I feel as if I barely recognise the country I was born in any more.

That reaction is part of the new Brexit Britain. There comes a time when we all learn that we can't go home again. The Montreal I grew up in no longer exists. If I want to go there, I turn to a novel by Mordecai Richler.

And there are always things about home that rub you the wrong way. Mahdawi does not deny Britain's pre-Brexit flaws. But it's depressing when things get really ugly:

I don’t want to romanticise pre-Brexit Britain. The country was not exactly an accepting utopia before the referendum. But Brexit unleashed something new and nasty: almost overnight, many people who were seen as in any way “foreign” felt unwelcome and out of place. Things seem to have got progressively worse ever since. Theresa May’s anti-immigration “citizens of nowhere” speech felt like a slap in the face. The premiership of Boris “piccaninnies” Johnson has felt like a punch in the gut. The government has been crammed with self-serving and out-of-touch ghouls such as Priti Patel and Jacob Rees-Mogg – a man who thinks that food banks are “uplifting”.

 What really depresses Mahdawi is the self-dealing:

It’s not just the government’s callousness that is depressing, it’s hearing from afar about the rampant cronyism and ruinous incompetence. Shorn of the softening effects of day to day interactions with kindly neighbours, close communities and good friends, to the international spectator Britain has become the world stage equivalent of the angry drunk who refuses to acknowledge it’s closing time. Being British had some cachet when I moved to the US a decade ago; now it just feels embarrassing.

Britain isn't the only example of this kind of rot. Today, in Washington, that rot comes to a head. The good news is that it looks like the infection is about to be lanced.

Image: Sound Health And Lasting Wealth