John, Jo and Imagine: some stories our country tells us
In 1971 John Lennon sang “Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do”. On the eve of the UK’s In/Out EU referendum, opinion polls show, that imagining “no countries” is proving very hard to do for millions of voters in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Watching the current Brexit debate I am struck by just how far we are from the optimistic early 1970s when John and Yoko asked the world to “Imagine” and the UK joined the European Economic Community.
In the 1996 four part film “Stories my Country told me” Arena addressed the complexity of national identity and how it is driven by the stories we tell ourselves. The story Thomas Mair wanted to tell appears to have been “Britain First” when he murdered Jo Cox, the MP for Batley and Spen, a Labour parliamentarian and mother of 2 young children.
Later, when asked his name in court, Thomas Mair refused. He had no name, but only the lines given to some B movie superhero caught up in the pathos of a fantasy revenge plot redolant of old style 19th Century national epics: “Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain”.
But what Britain? In truth Brexit campaign have been asking their voters to imagine too. Since EU membership is the status quo, the leave campaign have had to ask voters to Imagine a return to the UK’s situation in the world before 1975, an appeal to nostalgia rather than the utopian vision John and Yoko project.
In an published before she was murdered, Jo Cox wrote: “We cannot allow voters to fall for the spin that a vote to leave is the only way to deal with concerns about immigration. We can do far more to address both the level and impact of immigration while remaining in the EU. I very rarely agree with the prime minister but on this he’s right: we are stronger, safer and better off in.”
The film "Imagine Imagine" ends with the last Interview given by John Lennon, just before he was murdered on the 8th of December 1980. Talking in a clear and passionate voice John Lennon, the product of the international port city of Liverpool, a neo-New Yorker, but also proud of his Irish ancestry, came back again to 'Imagine’ the ballad he had sung nine years earlier. He attacked the need to have borders between the US and Canada. A reminder that in marrying Yoko he had crossed another border linking Asia and Europe.
In a service of remembrance Jo Cox’s sister Kim Leadbeater said: “We have to continue this strength and solidarity for the days, months and years to come as part of Jo’s legacy. To focus on that which unites us and not which divides us.”
Solidarity is the quality Jo Cox showed thoughout her life both as an Oxfam worker and MP. Her local minister called her a 21st Century Good Samaritan. Solidarity is also the name of Polish trade union that kick started the demise of the Iron Curtain, the border whose immensity was shown in Anthony Wall’s Arena journey along its entrails.
In the Cold War half a continent was denied European union – not by the ballot box, but by the barrel of a gun. The Iron Curtain began to fall with the Polish Trade Union Solidarity, around the same period when Lennon was shot in 1980. Yet despite his murder, the world has kept imagining John and Yoko’s dream and Poland joined the EU.
“You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one"
Yet what will the UK dream after Jo’s murder? The Brexit camp call the European Union a nightmare. They don’t want to ‘be as one’, but be one, alone and single in splendid isolation. Not so much New York as new Switzerland or New Norway.
John and Jo are no longer alive to vote, but on the 23rd of June millions do have the chance to use their imagination in the anonymous space of the voting booth and write the next chapter in the story our country tells us. Only then will we see if the tide of history turns and which Britain comes first.
This post was written by Fred Baker, an Academic and Film Maker who directed award winning Arenas:"Imagine Imagine" and "Eric Hobsbawm and the Pressburgerbahn" which was one part of Arena: Stories my Country Told Me.