A note on the UK Election — and on gratitude for Britain

Too much to get done today, and not enough time in which to do it. If I have any readers in the UK who have not yet voted, I urge a tactical vote against the Conservatives wherever possible. Here’s a good guide as to how to do that.

My nearest and dearest in Britain are voting Green; were I there, I would likely cast my vote for the Liberal Democrats. I like the latter party’s commitment to environmentalism, civil liberties, and capitalism with a human face. And from a psephological perspective, I am passionate about proportional representation and instant run-off voting, the sort of innovations that strengthen democracy and which only the Lib Dems support.

My brother and I were born in the States to an American mother and to our father, the son of Austrian war refugees who had spent his childhood and young adulthood in rural Oxfordshire. My father was 24 when he emigrated to California; he lived in the States for two-thirds of his life. But he was always culturally English. In one of those curiosities of families, my brother Philip (whose most recent book has just been released) always felt more at home in the UK than in America. More or less the first chance he got, he moved to the land our father called home; my adored younger sibling has been a professor at the University of Exeter for the past decade.

For reasons I’ve written about before (here and here and here), I’m most at home in California, particularly in L.A. But I love Britain, and I never forget that in my father’s family’s darkest hour, as the Nazis closed in after the Anschluss in 1938, it was Britain (not America) that gave them safe refuge. It was the British government who made it possible for my Viennese-born father to grow up milking cows on a bucolic farm near Wantage rather than perish in Auschwitz, as many other relatives did.

My late father made his life in America: two marriages, four children, a fine university career that spanned more than four decades. What stood out about him to so many was his astonishing gentleness, his kindness, his sincere interest in other people. The best aspects of him were, in no small part, nurtured by the people he grew up with. He never forgot the simple figures of his childhood; the dairymen and teachers and shopkeepers who welcomed his family and let him know, in no uncertain terms, that he — a half-Jewish refugee — belonged. I heard their voices in his, and still do.

I carry a British passport as well as an American one for many reasons. Not least to honor that heritage, and to honor those people — who in some way are my people — whose simple decency saved my family and formed the man who did so much to form me.

My father’s parents are buried in the tiny village of Kingston Lisle, a half-hour from Oxford, in the Vail of the White Horse. We recently had their graves restored. The names Georg Clemens Schwyzer and Elisabeth von Schuh might seem out of place there, a splash of the Teutonic in this very English graveyard. But England made them welcome, so very welcome, in life. And they remain so in death.