Brexit delivered a clear message to EU nationals like me that we were no longer welcome here - Donatella Montrone

According to the government’s own findings, “local authorities with higher proportions of people identifying as ‘English only’ recorded higher vote shares to leave the EU”. That so many English people wanted us gone is gutting.

Many Brexit voters are now grappling with the repercussions of their vote and so are reimagining the discourse that led to Brexit, claiming they were duped, lied to. Thing is, everyone was warned, repeatedly. But voters dismissed the warnings as project fear, not because they didn’t believe them but because they believed it was a small price to pay for the pleasure of not having Polish neighbours.

I remember the ‘Go Home’ vans that stalked the country in 2013. I was at a pedestrian crossing when one of Theresa May’s vans slowed over the crosswalk. Her message was clear: if you’re a foreigner not meant to be in our green and pleasant land, get out. A decade later, Lee Anderson is one-upping the vicar’s daughter.

England in particular is no longer the country that embraced me when I arrived 29 years ago: it was progressive, ideologically sound, gentle, where quality of life was high, opportunity was plentiful and pubs were bursting with jovial young people splashing about their disposable income. It felt like everyone had a place and there was a place for everyone.

Then why was it so easy to convince English people in particular that my presence, and that of people like me, was diminishing their lives, that the EU was shackling them, ramming us down their throats? That Spanish nannies, Italian baristas, Czech waitresses, Bulgarian bricklayers working hard, paying taxes, being productive were having a deleterious effect on their schools, their GP surgeries, and their prospects as fruit pickers? Leaving the EU was never about sovereignty, or straight bananas, or naked Frenchmen on rooftops – or about the NHS. The Tories got Brexit done, so they get a pass. Jacob Rees-Mogg is happy, the fish are happy, and everyone is free to swim in faeces-infested waters without having to suffer sanctions from those pesky Gallic lawmakers.

As an EU national, nothing could have prepared me for the day Britain’s duly elected MEPs turned their backs on a children’s orchestra playing Ode To Joy in the EU Parliament. I felt winded. But the UK’s final show of disrespect took place on the day Nigel Farage delivered his last speech to the EU Parliament. All around the world people watched the UK’s MEPs sneer, wave their Union flags wildly, laugh. Their disdain, their antagonism, stuck in my foreign craw like backwash. Enough of you didn’t want us here, so many have left. Those who went home didn’t ridicule you, troll you, wave their national flags and flip you the bird on their way to Stansted. Instead, many left broken-hearted, knowing that the country they once loved wants nothing more than to see them leave.

Donatella Montrone is a freelance chief sub-editor.