On identity, borders, and the cost of leaving Europe

I’m proudly British. Married twice to a French woman, both sadly deceased. Bilingual, dual-nationality children, and one British-Thai trilingual daughter who I hope will soon gain French citizenship.

I live in France. I love France. And I believe deeply in the idea of Europe as a shared civic space, not a cluster of anxious little fortresses eyeing one another across borders. Different languages, cultures and histories, yes. But bound by cooperation, freedom of movement, and a collective determination not to repeat the worst catastrophes of the 20th century.

The EU, for all its flaws, is not about erasing identity. It is about enlarging it.

This is our flag too 🇪🇺

I did not “wake up” to Europe recently. I have lived in France for decades. A cross-border, multicultural life. Work, family, languages. I never bothered applying for French nationality. Having voted in the 1975 referendum, which produced a roughly 67–33 landslide in favour of Europe, I assumed the question was settled once and for all. Not for a news cycle. Not for a generation. Settled. Then Brexit proved that assumption fatally naïve. Overnight, it was taken away by a whisker-thin ‘advisory’ referendum majority of those who voted, overturning a far larger, long-standing mandate. A campaign financed by a self-interested wealthy elite, driven by lies, nostalgia, a wilful ignorance of how modern Europe actually functions, and later exposed as a political sewer in which former UKIP MEP and later Brexit Party and Reform UK figure Nathan Gill was convicted of accepting pro-Russian money.

As a British citizen in France today, I can stay here indefinitely with a residence permit. But step across another EU border and I become a third-country national. Timed. Limited. Herded. Counted. Reduced. The freedom of movement I exercised for most of my adult life now exists only on paper, in my well-worn, soon-to-expire, burgundy passport.

That is not sovereignty. It is deliberate self-harm dressed up as pride.

So I am applying for French citizenship. Not to abandon Britain, but to reclaim the European identity that was stripped away against my will.

Rejoining will not be quick. It will not be easy. But the damage Brexit has done is structural, personal and generational, and pretending otherwise helps no one. The consequences of leaving are not going away either.

Europe was never the problem.

Walking away was.