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Brexit for breakfast on the morning after the morning after

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“Could you find me a newspaper?” I asked the young waiter as I sat down for breakfast Saturday morning at my hotel in Warrington, the northern English town where I had attended a friend’s wedding the day before. I wanted to read about the aftermath of Thursday’s referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union.

He obliged with the Daily Mail’s “historic edition.” The Second Coming type on the tabloid’s front page blared: “Take a Bow, Britain!” and it only got worse for a pro-EU American reader.

“It was the day the quiet people of Britain rose up against an arrogant, out-of-touch political class and a contemptuous Brussels elite,” the Page 1 subheadline continued. “Read the Mail’s incomparable writers on the most tumultuous events of the times.” (Hmm, maybe the Los Angeles Times should bill our writers as “incomparable.”)

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Inside was an editorial in which the pro-“Brexit” Mail gloated about the victory for “Leave” in the referendum .

“What an awesome tribute to the British people. Day after day, month after month, voters were bombarded with hysterical threats and terrifying scares – everything the government machine, the mainstream party leaders and the global political and financial elites could throw at them.

“They endured insults and abuse. Those who believed Britain could prosper as an independent nation, both in Europe and the world, were attacked as little Englanders. Those who were concerned about the effects of uncontrolled immigration on jobs, wages and the welfare of their children were smeared as ‘racists.’”

The editorial went on in that vein, but I won’t. It made for uncomfortable breakfast reading, especially when I did a check of the Brexit results and found that Warrington and neighboring areas had voted for “Leave.”

Most of the Brits I talked to in London before I came up for the wedding – journalists, “insiders” – had assured me that “Remain” would squeeze through. True, Thursday’s vote was tight (roughly 52%-48%); but the expectations of the “elite,” including soon-to-be-former Prime Minister David Cameron, were mortifyingly confounded.

There is more than a grain of truth in the Daily Mail’s complaint that pro-Brexit Brits were portrayed by “Remainers” as close-minded little Englanders. I sensed a lot of condescension in the way some of my pro-Remain friends described the other side -- not unlike the way exasperated American journalists and political insiders describe Donald Trump’s deluded supporters.

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But the fact that good people voted for “Leave” doesn’t make them right, any more than Trump’s candidacy is vindicated by the honest, hardworking Americans who support him.

As I finished my almost “full English breakfast” (I have never gotten used to beans and tomatoes in the morning), I thought of my landlady when I was a student in England in the 1970s. She and her husband populated their empty nest with students – but not just any students.

My landlady, who had fond memories of American GIs she had met during World War II, explained that she particularly liked to rent to Americans like me, even though we tended to overuse the shower and take up space in her refrigerator with huge containers of milk. (Her other favorite foreigners were white South Africans.) Had she ever had a French student as a boarder? I once asked. Never, she insisted, with an amphibian slur.

I’m sure she would have been appalled by the fact that when I arrived at Heathrow airport the other day I was shunted with the other arriving Americans to the “All Other Passports” line at immigration, while Europeans were whisked through UK/EU queue. So much for the special relationship!

I can only guess how she would have voted in the Brexit referendum, but my guess is probably pretty good.

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