The Night My Life Changed Direction

Ten years ago this week, my life veered off course to a place I never imagined in my wildest dreams.

Like most people, I watched the Brexit referendum as a political event but deep down I wasn't as worried as I should have been. I had opinions, concerns and hopes, but I did not imagine that the result would eventually reshape my family's life so completely that, ten years later, my children would be living in three different countries and I would be writing these words from Denmark. I guess at the time it was beyond my comprehension that the UK could cause so much damage to itself. Of course, I was living, sheltered in a constituency that voted 78% Remain in Scotland which also voted overwhelmingly to remain, so I didn't fully see the madness unfold in real terms. After the unimaginable happened to Jo Cox, I knew in my heart of hearts that the country I loved would stand up and reject the madness that had caused her murder. I was wrong.

On the TV, Brexit was discussed in terms of sovereignty, trade deals, immigration and economics. Politicians argued over percentages and projections while newspapers treated it like a sporting contest with winners and losers, bribed by the megarich to push to country in a direction that would benefit them rather than the man in the street. What nobody really talked about was the countless ordinary families whose futures would be quietly nudged onto entirely different paths.

Mine was one of them and I know very few of my friends with an EU connection stayed long after we left. Dynamic, clever, entrepreneurial people simply gave up on the UK and left for somewhere less mad in their eyes.

Ten years later, I sometimes find myself wondering what life would have looked like had the vote gone the other way. It is a pointless exercise because history offers no alternative versions for comparison, but it is difficult not to ask the question. Would we still have moved? I doubt it, as we only started looking for jobs once the complexity of Brexit started to affect our lives in real terms - I still remember when I tried to renew our mortgage (14 years into a 25 year term) and my bank asked me to go on the variable rate until they had clear guidelines about whether they were 'still lending to EU citizens!' Would the children's lives have unfolded differently? The three smaller ones didn't remember ever living anywhere other than our house in Newton Mearns and had gone through nursery and primary school with the same kids so their world was very small and very safe. Brexit blew their lives to oblivion and the people they are today were born from the ashes of that explosion. Would our family now be spread across Europe like pieces of a jigsaw that only fit together on holidays? Possibly - Marcel had already accepted a job in London with his English girlfriend. Charlotte became a teacher in Spain. Of course, she might have come home and taught in Scotland like several of her uni friends, but Spanish was always her passion, French was always a little too loaded because of her catastrophic relationship with her biological father so I suspect that Spain might still have won out, but what she lost, he lost and we lost was our base in Glasgow. 

It is hard for us to meet there now as it is difficult to impose a family as big as ourselves on any one friend or relative. Yes, we descend on my ever-suffering brother and his wife for five or six days every year but we are big, noisy, take up too much space, and so staying longer than that anywhere is out. Of course there are airbnbs and similar but like many things in the UK, they are overpriced compared to what you get elsewhere and it is hard to justify spending twice as much for a fortnight in Govan as I might for a fortnight in València or Gdańsk and so we meet away from our home, the place and the people who are dear to us and that is a sad loss to us all. Yes, we could go over in smaller batches, but holidays are the main times when we see each other, so we have to choose between Glasgow and each other and then there is no competition, of course. The people will always win out over the green place, however dear it may be.

We are still a family, of course, but distance changes things. Family life becomes an exercise in calendars, airports and Messenger messages. You miss birthdays, you miss ordinary Sunday dinners, and simply dropping by for coffee. You miss all the small moments that once happened naturally when everyone lived within reach of one another. We sure as hell didn't vote for that.

Nobody walked into a polling station thinking that ten years later some family somewhere would find itself spread across three countries, trying to maintain the same closeness through facetime and occasional visits. The greatest cost for me is not geographical but personal.

When my mother was dying, I was not there in the way I would have wanted to be. Distance has a habit of turning every family crisis into a logistical challenge, and every visit into a calculation involving flights, schedules and responsibilities elsewhere. Even when you make the journey, there is always the knowledge that you cannot simply pop round tomorrow or be there at a moment's notice. I managed to spend several weeks at her side but she died during one of my weeks back here because at the time I couldn't be both a daughter and a mother in the same geographical location.

That is one of the hidden costs of emigration. People talk about opportunities and adventures, but much less about the guilt. The guilt of not being present and the guilt of missing things. The guilt of knowing that some moments cannot be postponed until a convenient or affordable flight becomes available. It can be both frustrating and heartbreaking.

Brexit did not cause my mother's death, obviously, but it played its part in setting in motion a chain of events that left me living hundreds of miles away during the final chapter of her life, and that is a fact I will always carry with me.

Looking back, what surprises me most is not how much my own life changed, but how much Britain changed.

The Scotland I left in 2019 already had its problems, but it was still recognisably the country in which I had grown up. The Scotland I now see in the news often feels like somewhere else entirely. I never imagined I would see racist marches in Scottish cities, Reform MSPs, or reports of people being attacked in Edinburgh because they happened to be the wrong colour, nationality or religion. I never imagined that so many people would be hoodwinked into believing that immigrants were responsible for all problems that had been building for decades on the back of austerity, underfunding and media bias.

From a distance, Britain often feels trapped in a cycle of self-deception. Every election arrives with promises that taxes can be lower, services can be better, waiting lists can disappear, growth can return and living standards can improve, all without anyone having to make difficult choices or confront uncomfortable realities. Yet the arithmetic never changes. A country cannot spend years underinvesting in public services, infrastructure and growth and then expect everything to be fixed through slogans. Nor can it endlessly blame migrants for problems that are fundamentally rooted in economic stagnation, housing shortages, Brexit shrinkage and a political culture that has spent years promising easy answers to difficult questions.

Watching from abroad, what strikes me most is how unstable British politics has become. Since the Brexit referendum, Britain has burned through prime ministers at a remarkable rate, each one presented as the person who will finally restore competence, stability or growth, only to be discarded when reality inevitably proves more complicated. I can't see how this pattern is going to be broken until the UK does some realistic soul searching.

The deeper problem, it seems to me, is structural. Britain increasingly behaves like a five-party political system while continuing to operate an electoral model designed for a two-party age. Under first-past-the-post, governments can secure enormous power with the support of only a minority of voters - as little as 20-25% can grab power, so millions of votes effectively disappear. The result is a political system that swings wildly between competing visions of the country's future without ever building a durable consensus. Here in Denmark we have many parties and PR so all governments are coalitions which keeps the madness at bay. The equivalent of Reform can only ever gain a minor role in a government with the help of right and centre parties so their madness is diluted. And better still, at the moment our government is more or less the equivalent of what in the UK would be a coalition of Labour, LibDem, plus two Green leaning parties, which is much less stressful for a family like mine.

Proportional representation is hardly a miracle cure, but it might at least force politicians to work with one another and acknowledge that no single party possesses all the answers. At present, Britain often feels less like a mature democracy solving long-term problems and more like a permanent election campaign in which every issue is reduced to a headline and every setback requires someone else to blame.

The media has hardly helped. Too much of modern political coverage rewards outrage over understanding and conflict over honesty. Complex problems are squeezed into simplistic narratives, while politicians learn that appearing decisive is often more valuable than being truthful. The UK news seems to offer anger and outrage mixed with a bit a victim porn, whereas our evening news discusses the problems the country faces and the ways to fix them. We don't just show people outraged their taxes might go up, we show the tanks gathering along the Lithuania-Belarus border towards Kaliningrad and explain why we need more tax money directed at defence. 

Perhaps that is why I increasingly feel like an observer looking in through a window. The country I grew up in still exists in many ways, and there are still people, places and values that I love deeply, but I no longer entirely recognise the national conversation. It often feels angrier, more polarised and less capable of honest self-reflection than the Britain I remember. None of this means I have discovered a perfect alternative. Denmark is not paradise, and living abroad carries its own challenges, frustrations and loneliness. There are still days when I miss Scotland intensely and wonder how life might have unfolded had history taken a different turn. 

Yet there is also a sense of relief in living somewhere that feels calmer, more functional and less obsessed with turning every problem into a culture war. Denmark has many flaws, but most days it feels as though people are at least trying to solve problems rather than simply arguing about who should be blamed for them.