If Britain leaves the EU, I'll apply for a Spanish passport out of shame

My Spanish mother speaks English perfectly but with an accent almost as pronounced as Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Many years ago she found herself at a London tea room with an English diplomat’s wife in animated discussion about Bobby Moore, then the England football captain, who had just spent four days in police detention in Colombia, having been falsely accused of stealing an emerald bracelet.

When the English lady had finished venting her indignation she leaned towards my mother and confided, “You know, dear, these foreigners: they’re not like us.”

As I follow the Brexit debate the story keeps coming back to me. I cannot shake off the conviction that once you strip away the sound and the fury, the posturing, the statistics and the lies, the truth laid bare is that the real engine of the Leave campaign is an ancestral sense of superiority among the English — shared by upper-crust ladies and football hooligans alike — towards the benighted inhabitants of foreign lands.

It is practically impossible to have been raised in England (not Scotland, mark you; England) without having been indoctrinated in the notion that we are better than Johnny Foreigner, that we are the inventors and guardians of parliamentary democracy, that we are more upstanding and less corrupt than our European neighbours, whom of course we saved in two world wars.

This is the deep well from which the Brexit militants draw. This is why keeping the bloody foreigners out, known politely as the immigration question, has turned out to be their trump card. Leavening the argument with a dash of seeming economic respectability, citing the questionable threat to British jobs, allows the safely employed majority of Leavers to mask the grubbier truth that what we are really talking about here is an appeal to the ancient prejudices of the heart.

Complicate it all you want but a victory for Leave would be a victory for the lean-souled nationalism that binds together Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and now, since they allowed their politics to be usurped by the spirit of Ukip, the born-again anti-elitist Boris Johnson, the expert-bashing Albania enthusiast Michael Gove and the blimpish, twittish Iain Duncan Smith.

Remove from the debate the little Englander strain, with its pitiful whiff of imperial longings, and it’s no contest.

For all the moaning and groaning about Brussels, with the Leave campaign making as if an army of occupation had impoverished us and taken away our freedoms, look around the world and you’ll see that Britain is a mightily fortunate and prosperous place. Since joining the EU four decades ago the economy has grown more than Germany’s. The vast majority of economists say we’ve done well in the union and it would be madness to leave - an argument supported by the fall of the pound and the stock markets on the fear of a Brexit victory. Immigrants, as Boris Johnson used to say when he was mayor of London, have been a boost not a bane for the nation’s wealth.

But even if we were to concede that nobody can predict what will happen to the economy, or that within the £350m lies there might be some flicker of light within the Brexit side’s nation-of-shopkeepers rationale, how about a bit of big-heartedness? How about celebrating the vision of a Europe at peace under the EU after a thousand years of wars? And how about showing a generous sense of responsibility towards a continent that will suffer if we leave, with whose peoples we share the most enlightened democratic values and the richest culture the planet has mustered since humankind’s long journey from the primeval sludge?

I visualise the announcement of a Brexit victory on 24 June and I feel shame and anger. Shame to belong to a nation which would choose to see its identity reflected in the mean-mindedness and wall-building racism of Nigel Farage and his vile soul-cousin Donald Trump. Anger that my 16-year-old son — and the sons and daughters and grandchildren and great-grandchilden of all Britons — would be denied the opportunity I have been given, as a UK citizen who until recently was based in Barcelona (now in London), to study and work and live anywhere on the European continent that I please.

The first thing I’ll do it if happens is to apply for a Spanish passport for my son so that, thanks to the accident of his grandmother’s birth, he´ll be able to call anywhere in Europe but Britain home. The second thing I’ll do is apply for my own Spanish passport – for the same reason but also because I’d want to be able to limit the embarrassment of admitting to myself and to people I meet from around the world that England is the country of my birth.

John Carlin writes for 'El Pais'.