If even Stephen Fry has turned his back on Britain, what does that say about Brexit?

As a leading national treasure announces that he has taken Austrian citizenship, Femi Oluwole says it exposes a great irony – that Brexit was meant to be about freedom, yet without EU citizenship, we are trapped

Actor and comedian Stephen Fry now has an Austrian passport (PA)

When the most English man in England decides he’s Austrian, maybe Brexit hasn’t been the saviour of our national identity that was promised.

Fry has adopted Austrian citizenship under a law that grants the option to the descendants of Austrians who were persecuted in the Holocaust. He says it also allows him to stick his “tongue out at Brexit”. Given the number of people and businesses that have left the UK since the 2016 vote, has Brexit now turned Brits against Britain?

Since the referendum, hundreds of thousands of Brits have applied for EU citizenship and over 100,000 have been granted it. The bulk of this was, of course, for Irish citizenship. It exposed a great irony of Brexit: it was meant to be about freedom, yet without EU citizenship, we’re trapped.

We used to have the automatic right to live and work in 31 countries (EU, plus the single market countries of Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein). Now, we only have that right in the UK. I don’t know about you but I prefer voluntary love to forced marriage. Stripping Brits of their choice to live elsewhere has not made us love the UK more.

Our passport, the symbol of our identity, is literally worth less now. Didn’t Martin Luther King once say: “I had a dream, that one day, my passport will be judged not by the colour of its outer skin, but by the ports it lets me pass”? (I might be misremembering.) So no wonder Stephen Fry has decided to upgrade his British passport to an EU one. With it, he can now live in almost every country in Europe.

Personally, I never feel more British than when I’m abroad, because that’s when my British identity actually means something to the people around me. When I worked in France and Belgium, I was referred to as “the British guy”. And before 2016, I was proud of that. But two-thirds of Brits now say they are less proud of the UK than they were in 2018, before we left the EU.

Living abroad has become a privilege for those who happen to either have an EU grandparent, be rich enough to afford the visa charges, or be employed in a job that meets the minimum salary requirements of the EU country.

Now I’ve looked really hard, and I’ve struggled to find many Irish people in my family tree; nothing came up. I tried putting an apostrophe after the O in my last name.

Brexit was supposed to be about helping working-class people get a fair shot in the world. But working-class people are the ones now finding it hardest to work abroad.

For example, the 25,000 young Brits who used to work in seasonal hospitality around Europe? That opportunity’s gone now. The bureaucracy involved in employing Brits now, coupled with the 90-day limit for working in the EU, has simply made it too difficult for many holiday companies.

Brexit has left Brits feeling that our British identity isn’t enough. It has left many of us scrambling for the door. But that door is shut to all but the richest and those with dual citizenship, meaning that the average Brit doesn’t get to show Europe who Brits are. Meanwhile, Britain is seen as a country that foolishly shot itself in the foot.

One of my favourite Nigel Farage quotes is: “When I’m asked, ‘Are we going to be richer or poorer with Brexit?’, do you know what my answer is? What price freedom? What price our identity as a country? These are the arguments, actually, that really matter.” The people who brought us freedom said there was no limit to the price they’d be happy for the country to pay, to restore our national identity.

Imagine paying an unlimited price to save our identity, only to end up burning it down.