I went to the People's Voice March on Saturday along with some 699,999 others give or take. I travelled with a couple of friends, real life brother and sister T and K. We drove down to the town north of London, where I opened for the Pink Fairies in 1973, met a couple of my friends' friends, J and D, and we all travelled into Central London by public transport. On our return K posted some photographs up on her Facebook page that she had taken during the day. One of my cousins responded with the usual kind of "the people have spoken" response. J called him a troll and it all came a little unwound. I wanted to write a response to Frank, my cousin, and take an opportunity to work out why I thought it was important to go to this event. What I wrote turned out to be too long for a Facebook post, so here it is instead.
Hello, Frank. Thanks for your thoughts on this. I attended yesterday’s march, not because I want to undo the democratic process, but because I believe in it. The June 2016 referendum struck me as being informed more by emotion and feeling than understanding or knowledge. Real information was hard to come by. Having got this far, we now know more about what is likely to be involved with leaving the European Union. As far as I am concerned yesterday’s march was an expression of desire for people to be able to vote on whether we prefer the negotiated deal after we know what it is over the bluster and myths concocted in advance by politicians and media moguls who had no idea or who seem to have a vested interest in misinformation. Your contribution gives me an opportunity to try and gather my thoughts. My reasoning for staying within the Union goes along the following lines.
Firstly, the referendum itself, which I believe was an ill-advised tactic on behalf of David Cameron to hold on to power, was “advisory”. The documents made that clear. I believe it was a test of the country’s mood to try and prove to the Euro-sceptics in his party that there was no appetite to leave. Nowhere was it stated that the result would be binding. He should have got out more and talked to people round the country to find out what was worrying them. Somewhere along the way, though, Theresa May got caught up in the excitement and decided that “advisory” really meant “binding”.
The referendum is not like an election where we would have a chance to change course every five years. It would result in a fundamental change to what passes in the UK for a constitution and lead to changes in our relationships with every other country in the world. In such a case it is imperative that this be got right first time.
Fundamental changes, such as these would involve, are rarely left to a simple majority. Other important decisions in all sorts of organisations rely on at least a 60/40 majority. I would have preferred to see a much higher threshold for change considering this requires the unraveling of some 750+ treaties painstakingly negotiated over the past forty years. Two years was never going to be long enough to ensure a smooth changeover. Think back to when you bought your house. I bet the sale wasn’t completed in one day and I doubt you would have wanted it to be. You would have required your team to do its work properly. 750 treaties sorted out over two years amounts to about one a day in the time available.
The figures were also interesting in that while very close, the 52% majority represented just 37% of the electorate. I can see any number of reasons why people didn’t turn out to vote. Many who were likely to be most affected, such as the young and those living abroad (thanks to the freedom to live and work anywhere within the EU) were excluded. Then there was the paucity of quality in the arguments for and against. I tried really hard to make sense of it all and failed. There must have been many who did not have the opportunity to give the time I gave in order to research to try and work it all out. No wonder many felt compelled to leave it to chance or simply ran out of time to make a decision. After all, people like Liam Fox assured us negotiating new treaties would be a doddle, while Boris Johnson pulled figures out of his ... wherever to try and fool us that money being given to the EU would simply be channeled back into the health service. They have both since been thoroughly discredited.
Although my gut reaction was to be consistent and vote as I did in 1975, I wanted to give this matter serious consideration and was prepared to vote according to what appeared to me to be the evidence presented by credible witnesses. Without going deeply into the personalities involved I did not trust the noisiest politicians. In some cases I had good reason not to trust them based on the way many have treated experienced professionals when they held cabinet offices. Dogma over evidence doesn’t sit well with me. I researched, read widely, sat and watched many YouTube lectures by experts in many appropriate fields. I was looking for reasons to vote leave that actually had some substance. I found very few. One that almost convinced me was the so-called Lexit argument - based on the way countries like Greece had been held to ransom by the European bankers. In the end I decided that even this was insufficient to justify the chaos that would inevitably result if the leave result polled a majority.
There are many shortcomings in the European Union, but I felt that there would be nothing we could do to change the situation from the outside. In 1975 I voted to remain within the Common Market. The accumulated effects of the successive treaties of Paris, Rome, Maastricht and Lisbon have, over the years, changed the nature of the arrangement. If we were to make the Union work for everyone we had to be part of the gang. Come election times I would prefer to vote for a government that is prepared to engage with the rest of Europe in the pursuit of the best interests of us all, specially in the face of challenges from further away. Instead, we have had to witness decades of arguments amongst politicians within parties while we try and make some sense of the constant drip-feed of propaganda spouted in the mainstream media by the moguls who are fighting to maintain their vested interests as they stash their millions in overseas bank accounts.
Had someone, anyone, been able to articulate sound reasons for leaving, based on evidence of what would actually improve after leaving the EU I could have been convinced. I have a mistrust of large organisations and have always found myself drawn to a “small is beautiful” mentality. In practical terms acting locally while thinking globally requires us all to be more involved in grass roots affairs. This simply doesn’t happen. Even in my village the politics are too diverse for me to keep any kind of handle on what’s going on. I have personally spent a lot of time over the past two years (including eight days this year attending and speaking to committees of MPs and Lords in Parliament) as I have campaigned against a Bill that will cost me money and make my home less secure. This Bill will advantage those who have land, money and power already. It was nearly impossible to get support from others in my situation who would be similarly disadvantaged when this Bill receives Royal Assent. No doubt they will complain heartily when they see the new demands roll in to take their hard-earned cash. I don’t expect any thanks for an unprecedented twenty or so amendments and undertakings we forced through. However I don’t have the time or the inclination to be involved in the political process on this all-absorbing level. I have to leave it to others and hope that sometimes they do the right thing by the rest of us. I found nothing of sufficient substance in the “leave” argument that was compelling enough to sway my decision to vote in favour of leaving the EU.
Contrary to evidenced reasoning we were bombarded with platitudes that harked back to some imagined notion of Empire and how things were better in the past. I was a child in the 1960s when post-war confidence and optimism finally seemed to gain some traction, so of course life was better then. However, there were massive problems with attitudes and priorities in society that have required thought and legislation to put right over decades, much of this actually encouraged by the European Parliament. This has inevitably brought us a more complex society and things are unlikely ever to return to the way we thought they were, but in truth probably weren’t. The rise of the Information Age and globalised industry has meant things are unrecognisably different from our childhoods.
The issues that were raised as problematic by the leave campaign did not make sense to me. We never lost our precious “sovereignty”. We always had an option to agree or not with new legislation. New laws came from Europe because the UK government of the day agreed to them. We were never part of the Euro-zone and retained the pound, much to the delight and profit of the same bankers who were responsible for the crash. Every time I go to France I pay to change currency. This could have been avoided. Freedom of movement applied to all, including the Brits who take their pensions and relocate to Spain or Portugal. Objections to immigration seemed mostly based on prejudice and inaccurate information as far as I could see. We always had control of our borders. It was not the EU, but our own governments who set quotas or not. If we were concerned about immigration or asylum from beyond the EU, it was our own governments who helped create the chaos and bring destruction down on those in suffering societies by dropping bombs on them!
The referendum itself was deeply flawed. I am sure both sides stretched the truth to advantage its own message. The leave campaign, however, has been found to have broken the law in the way its campaign was funded. There is evidence to suggest that many messages spread by the leave campaign would not have gained the traction they did had the rules been applied honourably and rigorously. We all know that the despicable advertising showing queues of people from other ethnicities appealed to British xenophobia and not to any sense of accuracy and fairness. There’s also that small matter of £350,000,000 a week that was promised to keep the NHS afloat. That sounds pretty hollow now as we watch Richard Branson head the queue to buy up the profitable parts of NHS ahead of any number of US based insurance companies. Successive governments have sold off the UK and raided our pension funds at the same time as they sell licenses for speculative mining companies in which members of the families of our government and the judiciary appear to have shares in the companies that have brought at least nineteen earth tremors to the north-west in the past week as the process they employ also poisons the water. None of this is down to being part of the European Union. In contrast, the European project began, and may have had some success, in keeping a Third World War from beginning in Europe.
So, with twelve years left to keep global warming down to an unprecedented 1.5°C increase, a target we are likely to miss which will result in catastrophic climate change and death to millions, increased migration and many species being wiped out, we argue about where the DUP want to put a border as we flounder about trying to withdraw from the treaties to which we have voluntarily signed up over the decades.
I could go on, but this is long enough to give you some flavour that my path has attempted to follow a certain logic.
By far the worst aspect of the whole miserable process has been the name-calling and abuse that has split the country. I have friends who voted to leave, and thankfully we have been able to maintain a civil discourse as well as our friendship, but even so most of them cannot give me one single reason why it has turned out for the better. It has mostly appeared to have been down to a hope that we’ll do better on our own somehow. I personally think it unlikely that we are going to be able to pick up where we left off in 1973. The rest of the world may have moved on and there are families of farmers in Australia, who have still not forgotten how we abandoned them when we joined the Common Market. I don’t think they are likely to welcome us back with open arms. Perfidious Albion indeed.
