My attitude to what the kids are calling Brexit is a fairly selfish one at the moment. It simply throws my retirement plans into a shredder, and I’m not sure what emerges on the other side of that shredder in terms of:

• My right to live in France when I retire
• My right to health care and prescriptions in France
• The value of my pension
• My tax situation

And so on. Multiply my own personal issues with those of thousands of retirees in Spain and France and points beyond, and you have a bureaucratic tangle that makes my head hurt. It doesn’t matter which country you live in: you want as little to do with the authorities and their bureaucracy as possible. Even having to ask the question puts you at a position of disadvantage, in much the same way as concerned EU citizens and their offspring in the UK, who are encountering callous indifference and bewildering misinformation at every turn.

I believe I would have to be resident in France for two years before I could even apply for French citizenship. But how does one gain residency when no longer a citizen of a member state? It’s Catch 22, innit, and there are probably a hundred other Catches awaiting us. Then again, what are my chances of health care and prescriptions and a decent retirement if I stay in the UK? Slim to none, probably.

Leaving aside my selfish concerns, I’ve always had an ambivalent attitude to the EU. I’ve never liked the way that it bypasses democratic processes. Sure, we get to vote for MEPs, but (a) nobody cares about that, and (b) a huge amount of what the EU does has nothing to do with the Parliament in Strasbourg, and is undertaken by appointees. The power of patronage is the main power at work within the EU, and it’s no more a good thing than it is at home. Faceless bureaucrats and jobs for the boys ate our democracy.

On the other hand, European rules (on working hours, for example) provide, in theory, a level of protection from rapacious capitalism that our own government would be reluctant to supply. The shitty human beings who have been running this country for the past 40 years have always erred on the side of corporate concerns, with little regard for what is good for the public and society. So taking away what little protection the EU umbrella gives is a worry.

But maybe it shouldn’t be. Because it really is hard, looking around me, to see how things could get worse. The punishment meted out to the poor and vulnerable over the past 10 years happened while we were in the EU. The rise of zero hours contracts; the slow destruction of our infrastructure; the erosion of living standards; the GBH committed against the NHS; the public money being siphoned off through a giant hosepipe into the hungry maw of private capital — all of that is happening without any protection from an EU, which is hard-coded with neoliberal economic policies.

So bring on your wrecking ball, maybe?

Of course, the whole Brexit project was probably underwritten by secret billionaires who want to turn the UK into an offshore tax haven. But it was given a racist veneer of concerns about immigration. I don’t believe that the billionaires who run our media give a shit about immigration, for example. They don’t care about the burden on schools and the NHS or the welfare bill. Their kids/grandkids are privately educated and they have private health insurance. But they persuaded a lot of voters that the country was being overrun. And to their tame politicians, the whole thing was just a game: a few false promises and lies, nothing really matters, because we’re insulated by our money from the consequences.

Which leaves us where? Outside looking in, I should think. Outside the EU looking in, but also outside the Citadel of the Rich, their city in the sky, which is what they’re hoping to hide in as things fall apart.