Emily Iona Stewart Interview

14 May 2018

 

Can you explain a little bit about who you are, and what your job is?

I’m Emily Iona Stewart, I work for Seb Dance, a British MEP who represents London for the Labour Party, and I’m his Senior Policy Advisor, which essentially means that I work with Seb on the committees that he’s assigned to, so in this case it’s Environment and Development, and then all of the sub-committees he works on, and we work on LGBTI issues and youth issues as well.

How did you end up doing that?

I’m now married to a Belgian, but at the time I was living with my Belgian partner in London, when the last European elections were on, and we were talking about whether or not we would stay in London, or whether we would try and live in Belgium. We’re both very interested in European politics, so we decided to see if Labour got any new representatives. They did, and I wrote to them, and Seb was one of them, and I wrote asking if he might have any positions going, and after an interview, we were off to Belgium.

What is Seb like to work with?

He’s great to work with. I’ve got two other colleagues based in Brussels with me. Within the Labour Party out here we have silly awards that we give out every Christmas, and one of my colleagues won the Most Blair Award, and the other won the Most Corbyn Award, so we are a pretty diverse political church in Seb’s team. Working together, we’ve always had the opportunity to express our own opinions and thoughts. We’ve got a really lively office, a really young office, with a young, new MEP, and I have to say that for all the really depressing things that have happened electorally for pro-European Labour people in the last few years, we’ve managed to keep our spirits up. I think a lot of the credit for that must go to Seb, and his still being enthusiastic about the European project, and still being optimistic that there might still be an outside chance that we can swing this thing round to Remain.

How do you find living in Brussels?

Actually I don’t live in Brussels, I commute in from Bruges, which is where my husband’s from. It’s an hour down the road, which is the same length of time it took me to travel about 6km in London, instead of traversing half the country. I really love living in Belgium. I’ve got the best of both worlds. I live in a smaller city with really easy access to the countryside and the coast, and I commute in to the capital city every day, where I have lots of friends and there are lots of things to do.

What do you miss most about the UK?

Oh, crumpets. Crumpets and proper butter. And just dairy products in general. Belgium has very odd milk and very odd butter, and nothing quite tastes like it does at home. But also the bureaucracy out here is a little bit wonky. I do miss having the slightly more straightforward systems in the UK, rather than having the ‘computer says no’ syndrome you seem to come up against now and again in Belgium.

What was it like being filmed for the documentary?

Really interesting. When we were first approached by Chris and his team, obviously there was quite a lot of suspicion about being filmed, because there hasn’t really been anything done like this in the European parliament before, at least to my knowledge not really with the Brits. There’s quite a lot of suspicion in the British delegation about how we interact with the media, because there’s been a tendency in the past to wildly misrepresent us as champagne-guzzling layabouts, when actually people out here work really hard, outing their absolute all into working on the European level on behalf of the UK. Some other colleagues were approached as well, and a lot of people said no, because they were concerned it was going to be another “Oh look at the EU racy train, look at the silly MEPs” type thing. I’m really pleased that Seb came to the decision to say yes, I think the feeling that we all had in the office was “Well, what’s the worst that can happen?” People have already voted to leave, because they have this impression that we’re all out here legislating about the straightness of bananas. So maybe this was an opportunity to show that there are people out here really grafting, in a way that makes a really big, positive impact on the UK and the people that live there. We had them in our office a lot, so it was another dimension of work to get used to, but I think most people who go through an experience like this would say the same thing: That after a while you just relax into it and forget that the cameras are there.

How much of a life do you have outside politics?

I would love to say that I have loads of time for other things, but my experience of trying to hold down any hobby is that it’s impossible. Politics is all-consuming, but you also don’t know when you’ll be available, so if you try to start a club on a Wednesday evening and you pay for a few months’ membership, the chances are that you’ll only actually be able to make two sessions. Plus my husband works in politics as well, so when he gets home at night that tends to be what we end up discussing. I have a lot of Belgian friends who all do different things for a living, so when we go out at the weekend they don’t just want to discuss politics. So that gives me a bit of a mental break.

What do you do to relax?

I go running quite a lot – it’s the one hobby that I can fit around my schedule, because I can go whenever, wherever. And reading, which I do mostly on my commute.

What’s the best thing about what you do?

Probably the really diverse international atmosphere here, and being able to come across lots of different ideas every single day, and different perspectives on the way people think about things. It’s good for challenging yourself and your thought processes. Plus every day is different.

What’s the worst?

The canteen food.

You’d expect a bit better from Belgium!

To be honest, the food in Belgium in general is of a really, really high standard, it’s one of my favourite things about living here. But the canteen itself is not great – it’s a never-ending parade of weird, greasy food that just keeps getting recycled until it’s all been eaten by the end of the week.

What would you change about the EU? What are its imperfections?

I think the first thing I’d try and work in would be the communication. I have complete respect for the people who do it, because I realise that you have to be able to communicate what’s going on in the EU in a way that works for 28 member states and a number of different languages. That often means you end up distilling it down to its basic essence. But that doesn’t work in terms of getting an emotional response from people. That’s something that we’ve been missing. And I also think that there needed to be a pledge taken by politicians all around the EU that they will do their best to advertise the work that the EU does. There is a bit of a tendency of politicians of all stripes in the UK to claim successes as being the result of domestic policy, and all failures are the fault of the EU. Over time, that has engendered a real mistrust of the EU.

Why do you think the UK voted for Brexit?

The reasons people voted for Brexit are as diverse as the reasons people vote for any political party. That’s why we’re in the mess that we’re in now, because the government is trying to interpret a yes/no result on the basis of hundreds of different reasons people might have voted for leave. I think a lot of people were enticed by the idea that there might be some sort of Brexit rebate, that we’d get money back and be able to spend it on our own national resources, which is something that has been shown to be untrue. And I think referendums are often used by the public to show their displeasure with the government of the day. And we fell foul of that.

What will you do if Brexit finally happens?

That’s a really good question. I really wish I had the answer, because I’m being asked that on an increasingly frequent basis. I think I just need to make up some clever lie at some point, about a fantastic job waiting for me with Amnesty International. But the truth is, beyond knowing that I want to stay in Belgium, I actually do not have a plan. I might tale a short break for myself, to figure out the answer to that. But I’ll be here until they literally pull us out of this place.