What I saw at the Brexit

What I saw at the Brexit June 24, 2016

Well, not much, to be honest, by which I mean this:

the agenda for the morning was a tour of the Houses of Parliament.  An audio tour, because it was half the price of a guided tour (when taking into account the fact that kids were free for the audio tour); we finished up just in time to eat yet another sandwich in yet another museum/attraction cafe for lunch, then explored the area.

I really expected there to be a lot going on, even if just a lot of Brexiteers celebrating, but perhaps the consequence of the result being announced in the morning (or very late at night; my husband stayed up past midnight to see the initial results) is that everyone has to go back to work.  So the area was largely populated by tourists.

There was a protest going on, but it had nothing to do with anything — it was a protest against sexual assault by Uber drivers, which I’m assuming is more a protest against Uber in general.

We also took a look at the unofficial memorial for Jo Cox.

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(The candles, curiously, are battery/electric tea lights.  Presumably they were turned on when they were placed there, and have now burnt out.)

But we wandered a bit further, and came upon the base camp, if you will, for the journalists.  Reuters, AP, Deutsche Welle, Eurovision, all manner of broadcasters set up shop in what turned out to be, checking on a map, the Abingdon Street Gardens, and we watched as several of them gave their reports, standing with the crowds of onlookers along the eastern edge of that area.

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Here’s a Deutsche Welle interview:

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This is an “N24” anchor — a European 24 hour news network.  Fun fact:  she’s wearing a suit jacket and jeans; perhaps they’re just filming her from the waist up.

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Then we circled around to the south, and there the onlookers seemed more expectant.  It seemed to me possible that there may have even been politicians whom people had been hoping to see, and as one somewhat official-looking man left the area, a bystander cheered him as “our next prime minister.”  Was he really someone of any political importance?  I almost grabbed my camera to take a picture, just in case, but, well, I wasn’t fast enough.

Then we walked on to 10 Downing Street.  Turns out, you can’t see it except from the end of the block, through a fence, so the best I can say is that I was within a block of the spot where David Cameron announced his resignation earlier in the day.

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And along the way we came past this rather sad, lonely sight:

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Now it’s evening, and we’re watching the evening news on the BBC, where the anchors are broadcasting from the site where we spectated earlier today.

I’ll leave the further commentary to the experts, except to share a link to Megan McArdle’s piece, which observes that this is indeed not the end of the world.  And what I find noteworthy about the reporting here vs. from the U.S. is that there are real divisions by region — London vs. the rest of England, and England vs. the rest of the UK — which we’re not particularly aware of from outside looking in.


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