Nosheen Iqbal - Top linguist: ‘I’m leaving the UK because of the disaster of Brexit’
One of Britain’s most
celebrated young linguists, a master of 15 languages and author of two books, is
quitting the UK, blaming “a dangerous political atmosphere” following the Brexit vote
and “the financial brutality” of living and working here. Alex Rawlings, 27, was
reading languages at Oxford in 2012 when he won a competition to find the UK’s
most multilingual student. Tweeting
about his decision last week, he wrote: “Just booked a one way flight
out the UK. Not an easy decision to leave family and friends behind, but
there’s a bad atmosphere in the country and I need to get out.”
Speaking to the Observer this
weekend, Rawlings, who now works as a language teacher and app developer, said
he was stunned by the public apathy about Brexit. “This whole country is
on the brink of the worst disaster since the second world war, and everyone is
just sipping coffee, going about their daily business as if nothing is
happening.” Rawlings, who is half
Greek and retains a Greek passport, will move to Barcelona on 1 November to
pursue “creative passion projects”.
He has travelled in
more than 50 countries, and said: “One of the things I was always most proud of
in the UK was that this is a place where anyone can belong, which is an amazing
achievement. That is now being threatened by the populist rhetoric of
politicians and the laziness of the media in not challenging it.” Fears of a post-Brexit
brain drain on talent working in the UK were not, he felt, unfounded.
“I don’t want to live an environment where I have to apologise for believing in
European unity.” Rawlings, who speaks
Russian, Italian, Dutch, Hungarian and Hebrew among many others, said: “I have
huge faith in the people of the UK to sort this out eventually. It will take a
generation… and in the long term, it will be good for the country to realise
its own insignificance.”
The question of what
it means to be British would, he said, remain fractured because “we have never
done what Germany did and talk about the legacy of empire, about the terrible
things this country has done in the world. That the majority of people in the
UK think the British empire was a force for good is terrifying”. It was a summer in
Athens with his family, aged eight, that changed Rawlings’s life and allowed
him to realise that “if you just climb over the side of the English-speaking
box and look out, the world’s a very different place out there. There is more
that unites us than divides us but everything we take for granted about
national identity is pure chance.”
