With 25 Days to Brexit, The Four Fathers Release New Single ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’

Today marks 25 days until the UK is supposed to leave the EU, and my band The Four Fathers are taking the opportunity to release — via Bandcamp — our anti-Brexit anthem, ‘I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, which has become something of a live favourite over the last couple of years.

Please have a listen to it, share it if you like it, and, if you want, you can even buy it as a download (for £1/$1.25 — or more if you wish).

I wrote it in the weeks after the referendum, when the chorus came to me out of the blue — as often happens to me — and I then struggled to hammer out some verses, aimed at the stupidity, arrogance and lies of, variously, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and David Cameron. However, although the chorus arrived fully-formed and has never changed, I thoroughly revised the lyrics for the verses after discussions with my friend, the musician and producer Charlie Hart, whose suggestions led me in a direction that was — at least partly — more poetic, especially in the song’s opening lines: 

It was just after the summer solstice

When it should have been sunny and bright

But a darkness fell over everything

Extinguishing all light

You can listen to the song or buy it below:

I Want My Country Back (From The People Who Wanted Their Country Back) by The Four Fathers

I also recognise in my lyrics that some who voted to leave the EU were reacting against the erosion of their lives, communities and livelihoods, which has taken place since the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, and was not reversed under John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or David Cameron, but it still pains me that so many people don’t seem to realise that the EU didn’t fundamentally play a role in this, and that the blame for it lies with our own governments, whether Tory or New Labour (or, from 2010-15, the Tories backed by the Lib Dems).

In my lyrics, I still take aim at the isolationists, and reflect on how, to my mind, the tendency of patriotism is towards war. I also take aim at the racists and xenophobes, empowered by the referendum, who have changed Britain for the worse since June 2016. Since the referendum, whenever I meet EU nationals, I apologise for that happened, and then ask them if they have been abused in any way since then — and I have yet to meet any EU national who hasn’t, at the very least, been shouted at in the street and told to “f*ck off back home.”

It’s hard to believe that, on March 29, we’re supposed to leave the EU, and that this date marks two years since Theresa May triggered Article 50, the mechanism for doing so. It’s also hard to believe that it’s nearly three years since the referendum, which I still believe was, fundamentally, an act of gross political cowardice and folly on the part of David Cameron that was then picked up on by the Euro-sceptic lunatics on the far right of the Tory Party, who everyone, from Ted Heath onwards, kept in a box, and which they sat on until Cameron, scared by the rise of UKIP and the increasing noise from the box, decided, with monstrous hubris, that he would defuse UKIP and the Euro-sceptic loons with an idiotically ill-conceived referendum. 

Sickeningly, the subsequent twists and turns of the Brexit soap opera have drowned out almost all other meaningful political debate about British politics, as the “age of austerity” that was cynically implemented by Cameron and George Osborne when they took office in 2010 has continued to destroy the state and the very notion of civil society, and continues to see the Tories determined to drag Britain back to the mid-19th century in terms of the suffering and punishment of the poor, and the deliberate fostering of an ever-growing chasm between rich and poor.

And, in the meantime, Labour — for the most part, and in particular in the councils it controls — fails to challenge the austerity agenda, and is now just as gleefully joining in the plundering of the poor for profit — via the disgraceful ‘regeneration’ industry that is committed to destroying social housing and local businesses for unaffordable new developments that are bad for everyone except the developers and the other leeches who profit from them.

In the wake of the EU referendum, the dogged but dim Theresa May, the former home secretary whose six-year tenure was overflowing with the most alarming racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia, filled the void left after David Cameron’s instant departure, and, since then, has obsessively tried to deliver the undeliverable — a Brexit that doesn’t cripple the British economy. 

I share the conviction of others who have looked into Brexit closely, who have realised that it is actually impossible to leave the EU without destroying one’s economy, and who have also realised that this situation was set up deliberately. As the great anti-Brexit analyst Ian Dunt explained in his book, Brexit: What The Hell Happens Now?:

Article 50 is brutal. Insofar as it was ever expected to be used, it was as a punishment mechanism. ‘I wrote Article 50 so I know it well,’ the former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said shortly after the Brexit vote. ‘My intention was that it should be a classic safety valve that was there, but never used.’

It’s not that I believe the EU is perfect — far from it. Its neo-liberal impulses are genuinely dangerous, but freedom of trade and movement within the EU has, to my mind, helped to erode the kind of narrow nationalism that led to centuries of war, and, in any case, on a purely pragmatic basis, untangling over 40 years of laws and treaties tying us to the EU appears, genuinely, to be impossible.

Whatever its failings, changing the EU should take place from within, rather than, as the Brexiteers want, isolating ourselves as a backwards-looking island that is free to be as racist as it likes, and as delusional as it likes, thinking that isolation is the way forward in an inter-connected world in which we need other countries at least a much as they need us.

With 25 days to go, I’m still hoping that there’s an escape route. In the song, I conclude by stating, “The only light in the darkness / Is that Brexit will destroy whoever makes it real”, but I’d rather it didn’t quite come to that, and that we can pull ourselves back from the brink before that destruction comes true.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from six years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.