They’re coming for our kettles and they’ve got their eyes on our toasters. Those faceless EU bureaucrats will stop at nothing to see our lawnmowers reined in and our hairdryers tamed, our milk bottles outlawed and our Sunday roasts served undercooked. They even want to make our condoms smaller – but our mighty British manhood will not be constrained!
At the Hunter-welly-wearing core of the Brexit campaign is a fascinating identity crisis centred on the British home. For Brexiters, home is where the idea of nationhood is constructed, the vessel for all the values we hold dearest. And it is this doily-strewn domestic landscape that is now imperilled by a litany of imaginary threats.
When it comes to the ballot box, where the beloved English tradition of the blunt pencil and the rickety foldaway booth awaits in a quaintly tea-stained village hall, the arguments will no longer be about economics or immigration, but square gin bottles and eggs sold by the dozen, red pillar boxes and village fetes, cream teas and the sound of leather on wood. They will be about rewinding to a time before Brussels ever waded in with its newfangled ways.
The Brexit rallying call has become a war cry bellowed from a flimsy stage set of Britishness, by an army whose primary weapon is a poisonous cocktail of nostalgia and fear. And in a surreal turn of events, domestic appliances have found themselves on the frontline of the scaremongering campaign. The twin British traditions of tea and toast are now in the EU’s firing line, we are told, with sinister plans afoot to castrate our kettles and turn down our toasters in a bid to save the environment.
“My toaster takes four attempts before bread goes brown,” tweeted the furious Ukip MEP David Coburn earlier this year. “Many thanks to EU.” He lated added: “My old toaster seemed to be powered by the Torness nuclear reactor … this one is powered by some kind of EU windmill.”
Coburn’s outpouring came in response to the European Commission’s Ecodesign scheme, an initiative aimed at improving the environmental performance of products sold across the EU. It first introduced a ban on energy inefficient vacuum cleaners in 2014, leading to panic buying of turbo hoovers among the house-proud. It makes the vocal Leave position of our billionaire emperor of domestic suction, James Dyson, all the more fitting.
The extension of the Ecodesign programme to other appliances has now been delayed, after fears it would lend ammunition to the Brexit campaign. But it’s not the first whiff of foreign meddling in the British home to have been taken up and massaged into a shocking scandal by the populist mouthpieces of the Leave lobby.
Twenty-five years of Europhobic rumours, half-truths and lies have been lovingly documented on the Euromyths website, an enthralling window into the paranoiawhipped up by the Daily Mail and the Express. Picture a conservatory, relentlessly battered by assaults on “the British way of life”.
“Now Brussels targets your lawnmower,” screamed one Mail headline in 2014. The truth behind the story was the introduction of new measures to cut toxic emissions from petrol engines, bringing other machines into line with regulations imposed on car engines years ago. “EU allows poisonous mower chemicals to kill our children,” might have been the headline if Brussels hadn’t acted sooner.
Other topics range from binge-drinking to barstaff’s cleavage and barristers’ wigs, those cherished staples of British culture allegedly threatened by EU directives.
“Hands off our barmaids’ boobs,” raged the Sun in 2005, in response to EU rules that require bosses to assess the risk of skin and retina damage for employees who are forced to work in the sun all day. The same paper railed against European Commission research into excessive alcohol consumption among young people and its connection to heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver and drink-driving. The suggestion that barristers stop wearing horse-hair, meanwhile, wasn’t anything to do with the EU at all.
The Euromyths site reads like a Brexit shopping list, running the gamut from double-decker buses to darts in pubs, lamp-posts to lollipop ladies, mince pies to mushy peas. One minute Brussels wants to ban oak trees, the next it wants to rip the Queen’s face from the pages of our passports. Those meddling men in suits want to outlaw saucy seaside postcards and get rid of rocking horses, put an end to thatched roofs and banish miniature steam engines.
It’s not just our image, apparently, but the taste, sound and smell of Britishness that is threatened, too. Those fat cats are intent on attacking all our senses, with measures that will silence our canons and muffle our church bells, as well as prohibit our favourite crisp flavours: prawn cocktail and smoky bacon. The philistines even want to obliterate the fishy smell of Grimsby.
None of the above, if you read the facts behind the outrage, is true. But when did facts ever get in the way of a Eurosceptic headline?
It is a pernicious narrative of nostalgia, ongoing since the very foundation of the European Union, and one that has reached a frothy boil of sentimental nationalism. Leaving the EU won’t miraculously transport us back to the 1950s, nor will it make our toast any browner or our kettles heat faster. It will leave us very much alone, hemmed in by higher hedgerows, drowning our sorrows in a square bottle of gin to the sound of noisy vacuum cleaners.