I was 25 when I first set foot in Britain in 1995, incidentally the same year Bill Bryson published his bestselling travelogue Notes from a Small Island. Voted by BBC Radio 4 listeners as the book which best represented Britain, Bryson’s humorous account of his final trip across the country before moving back to his native US was my first guide into the idiosyncrasies of the British way of life and a language I thought I spoke well until my fateful “Tarzan-Jane” encounter with the immigration officer in Heathrow. It would take me a while to get used to two-tap sinks, outward opening windows and Marmite but, just like Bryson himself, I was happy to be called “love” by all the shop ladies in town.
The mid-1990s were interesting times for a young student of nationalism from Turkey though not as interesting, admittedly, as today. The Provisional Irish Republican Army had just declared a ceasefire, paving the way to the first meeting between the British government and Sinn Féin in over 70 years. The political field was enlivened by internecine leadership battles within John Major’s Conservative government, and an aspiring Tony Blair warming up in the outfield to join the game on the side of the Labour. Speaking of fields and outfields, the Premier League was also pretty exciting despite the absence of oil-rich Arab or Russian oligarch club owners, for there was Eric Cantona – the maverick with little understanding of the distinction between the two, as his notorious kung-fu kick against a Crystal Palace supporter when he was playing for Manchester United showed.
Otherwise, Euroscepticism and a strong sense of national pride were almost as popular back then as they are today. At least half of the public has been Eurosceptic for the past two decades, the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) reminds us. 37% and 58% wanted to leave the EU or see an attempt to reduce its powers in 1995 and 1996 respectively, as opposed to 62% in 2014 and 51.8% in 2016, the percentage of people who voted “Leave” in the Brexit referendum.
