I was watching France24's debate this evening, and it was, obviously, about Brexit.
One participant was a shrill Londoner lady living in NY NY, who wouldn't allow her main opposition speaker the silence within which to say his piece. (She is an ex-Conservative official of some sort.) She simply didn't understand why he might be miffed to see his journalistic career in Paris coming to an end. Somehow, the appropriate action for him, she said, was that he become French. That he is English and intends to remain English didn't register; the confusion in her mind that you have to be one or the other was really surprising - or maybe not. Perhaps the richer southern England ladies see a different form of life to the rest of us. The funnist thing was to hear her incessantly say 'the people have spoken' as if she were in some workers' meeting or another. I don't think she'd recognize - and certainly wouldn't understand what they were saying - if she ever did come face to face with one of the 'people'. Jeez, I could hardly understand her!
The guy brought up the matter of old British people living in Portugal, and her response was the same. I wonder if she imagines that all pensioners also enjoy private means, dip into some family vault as and when... you know, jolly back and forth from one home to the next as the seasons dictate. Ah, winter: must be Antibes.
Nobody on the show confused retirees with colonizers; at least even she, Ms. Shrill, wasn't that thick. Neither did she draw a parallel between people having a right to vote (which neither the Brit journo working in Paris had, nor did I) with the notion of taxation and representation, which would obviously imply that were you unfortunate enough to find yourself employed long-term, paying no tax, then you should automatically be denied your suffrage until you got your act together again and started paying into the system. On the other hand, perhaps not such a bad idea after all! But of course, she didn't have it.
