As a family using foreign languages with our children, that is. Brexit is not shaping up to be pretty, and with attitudes hardening among hardcore leavers, Farage's brand new Brexit party clocking up 100 000 members in days etc, I am genuinely worried about being abused in public.
For context, I am British but we live abroad; I use my first language with my children which is not English, and DH uses yet another language. We speak in English with each other and the DC have a mostly passive knowledge of it. Even if they were fluent in English I would prefer not to change our family language policies while on vacation anywhere.
We normally holiday in the UK every year. I love the country, and as a naturalised citizen I proudly swore to uphold its values and institutions. I attended a Russel Group university on private scholarships, have had good jobs, only used the NHS for the odd GP visit while I lived there, while (very happily) contributing social security and taxes, so my balance with the system is heavily in the positive. I'd personally feel quite happy to tell any xenophobe who'd pick on us while spending our money in support of the UK economy to fuck off (provided it's reasonably safe to do so), but I do not want to expose my children to unpleasant scenes, let alone to feeling threatened.
For anyone who wants to come in and accuse me of trolling or paranoia: it is always less visible to members of a majority what minorities being picked on go through. There are people hating "foreigners" in every country, it's not specific to the UK or England either. To the contrary, I always found the UK to be one of the most wonderfully tolerant and welcoming countries I've lived in. But Brexit - the campaign leading up to it, and all that has gone down since - seems to be undoing this legacy, and people who might previously have kept their antipathy to themselves can now feel emboldened to let it loose.
I don't necessarily want to stir up a hornets' nest with this post; but I need to fix our vacation plans and I am genuinely very torn about this!