West Lebanon
Yet British subjects living and visiting the Upper Valley are divided, like Britain itself, over the decision that will force out the government of Prime Minister David Cameron and has exposed a gulf between segments of the British population and a backlash to decades of economic globalization.
The Upper Valley is headquarters to several manufacturers that look to the U.K. market and Europe as a source of revenue. They don’t see Britain’s withdrawl from the E.U. — the so-called ‘Brexit’ — as a good thing.
“It will take a little while for us to fully digest but most immediately it means we bring back fewer dollars for business we transact in pounds sterling,” said Evan Smith, chief executive of Lebanon-based Hypertherm Inc., which makes sophisticated industrial cutting equipment and receives about a quarter of its revenue from the U.K. and Europe.
What’s more, Smith said, Brexit casts a pall over the “European project” of a unified and orderly market. The vote results have led to speculation that other countries — such as France or Holland — that have growing populist movements could follow Britain’s lead.
“Anytime you have questions like that, it dampens confidence and reduces spending and could slow economic activity in Europe,” he said.
The Brexit also could lead to foreign rivals getting a leg up on U.S. businesses selling in Britain because the rising value of the U.S. dollar compared to the British pound makes the purchase of U.S. products costlier for British companies, noted Bailey Smith, executive director of business development for Fujifilm Dimatix, a Lebanon-based company that makes high-tech printheads for industrial manufacturers.
Fujifilm Dimatix, which now generates more than half its revenues from sales outside the U.S., could lose sales to a competing British printhead maker as the value of the pound falls, just like U.S. exports benefit in global markets when the dollar is weak.
The uncertainty triggered by Brexit not only potentially affects sales, Smith noted, but also costs because “changes in the European currency rate affects our supplier base.”
British-born Dartmouth College economics professor David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, has fired off more than 55 tweets since Thursday slamming Cameron’s government for being caught off guard by the Brexit vote.
He predicted Britain’s exit from the E.U. will be an economic disaster for the country.
“This is Black Friday and now the Brexiters will have to explain why they didn’t listen to the experts who told them this would happen,” read one of Blanchflower’s tweets on Friday. “Brexiters need to tell us what their plan is to prevent a recession the pound falling another 10-20% and (stock exchange) falling 10% or more.”
Meanwhile, British ex-pats throughout the Upper Valley reacted to the results of Thursday’s vote with surprise and a more nuanced view, although for the most part they expressed disappointment.
Several pointed to concerns over immigration as a reason for the vote to leave the EU, but they disagreed about whether it was a sufficient reason to make such a change.
At least one British ex-pat living in the Upper Valley expressed understanding of voters’ choice.
“I don’t blame them,” Hanover resident Margaret Brannen, a British ex-pat, said.
Her sisters both voted to leave the EU, Brannen said. Their primary concern was migration, she said. They blamed immigrants coming to Britain to work and send money home for taking jobs from natives, Brannen said.
“One of my sisters, she takes the bus to work and she’s the only one speaking English,” Brannen said.
She noted that Norway and Switzerland have done just fine without joining the EU.
At a soccer camp at Thetford Elementary School on Friday, two visiting British coaches had differing views on the Brexit vote.
“I think whatever happens, it’s not going to change anything big,” Ryan Gibson, a 22-year old from Leeds said.
“I wasn’t happy with it at all,” Max Burns, 23, of Liverpool, said in response. “It started from the refugee crisis, with a lot of racism, to be honest.”
Burns said Liverpool voted “in,” because it’s more multicultural.
Burns said he may stay in the United States to coach soccer in the long term. He says the parallels between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Brexit movement worry him.
Hartford resident Chris Flockton, who was born in Scotland, has been in the U.K. for the past week and a half.
In a phone interview from London, he drew a comparison between the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU and U.S. politics.
“I feel like the majority of the arguments on both sides have been very general and very emotional,” he said.
As in the U.S., Flockton said, there is an anti-intellectual movement in Britain that helped to shape voters’ views.
In addition, he said the rhetoric in advance of the vote played on people’s xenophobia, nationalism and “not-too-well-masked racism.”
The rhetoric appealed to “people who are unhappy with their lot,” he said. “I think that the ‘leave’ movement just did a better job of making the emotional argument.”
Julia Lloyd Wright, of Weathersfield, said she knew the vote would be close, but she was expecting it to go the other way.
“It was a shock,” said Wright, who is English. “It will be very, very different.”
She particularly worried about Brits who are on vacation in Europe right now and retirees who live outside of Britain but rely on British pensions.
“That will affect them monetarily,” she said, noting that the value of the pound has dropped significantly since the vote.
Despite her concern for the moment, she said she is sure that the pound will bounce back in the long run.
Like Wright, Mick Maguire, a British ex-pat living in Tunbridge, said he was very surprised by the outcome of the vote.
“Personally, I would have voted to stay,” Maguire said. “It just seemed like it was common sense.”
The European Union has been a source of dissatisfaction among British people for years, said Maguire, 50.
A management consultant, Maguire moved to the U.S. in 2001, at the tail end of the dot-com bubble.
Many Brits were frustrated by the change to the metric system and they disliked the EU’s austerity plans, he said.
Some of his family members voted to leave the EU because of concerns about immigration, but Maguire said immigrants were falsely blamed for problems with services that were really caused by funding cuts.
The vote left British ex-pat Fiona Davis, of Hartland, feeling a sense of loss.
She anticipates it is only a matter of time before other countries follow Britain’s lead.
“It’s just really sad that this amazing grand experiment is going to disintegrate,” she said.
Despite the union’s problems, she said, she believes Europe has been a better place with the EU.
“Those problems were minor compared to what they could have been,” Davis said. “People have severely underestimated what leaving means.”
To Davis, the loss reflects a decline in inclusiveness across Europe.
“There just seems to be this very predominant move to … countries putting themselves front and center,” she said.
While Lyme resident and British ex-pat Simon Carr said he thinks it will be “disastrous” for Britain to leave the EU, unlike Davis, he thinks the EU will survive the loss.
While the union may remain intact, Carr said, the problem is that “Britain will be sitting on the outside.”
Carr predicted much of the business conducted in the financial service industry in London will move to Frankfurt.
“It’s actually going to strengthen (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel’s position,” he said.
Voters seem to have been swayed by a perception that the EU has been regulating too much of British people’s daily lives and that leaving the EU would give Britain more sovereignty, Carr said. For example, he said, there’s a joke that says that the EU requires all cucumbers to be straight.
“What I’m hearing is the people who actually have been pitching the exit think that Britain can be a unique entity on its own and go back to what it had been as a commonwealth,” he said.
But Hypertherm’s Smith thinks it could only exacerbate a troubled global economy.
“We’re in an industrial recession already for at least year, which means business spending is down and depressed. Some of that has to do with strength of dollar and China slowing. But a lot of it just has to do with confidence.
“Business investors, CEOs, are humans like anybody else. It’s psychological. So if you feel greater uncertainty about something like this rattling through the markets, you may sit on the sidelines a bit longer,” he said.
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com and Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at 603-727-3213 or ndoyleburr@vnews.com. Correspondent Henry Nichols contributed to this report.
