It’s two days before Britain decides whether or not to leave
the EU and there are two leaflets at the front door. One is “Labour in for
Britain” on behalf of Remain and the other is an “EU Myth Buster” on behalf of
Leave. My vote has long since been decided but I thought I’d have a look at
them both. The Remain leaflet states that 3 million jobs are linked to our
trade with the EU and leaving puts those jobs at risk. A fair concern. The
other point it makes is that leaving the EU risks us losing some of our rights
at work, such as paid leave, parental leave and equal pay, all of which are
currently safeguarded by our EU membership. Again, seems fair enough.
Then I looked at the Leave leaflet. “The EU costs us £350
million per week- we could spend that on the NHS instead”. It makes two other
references to how we could build a new NHS Hospital every week with this apparent
£350 million saving, or alternatively we could spend it on schools or housing. That
sounds brilliant, except this Tory government has stripped apart our NHS,
forced doctors and nurses to strike and refused to hold talks with them.
Michael Gove, leading campaigner for the Leave campaign, was himself almost single
handedly responsible for making the teaching profession an utter misery,
leading to a multitude of strikes and a huge number of talented young teachers
deciding to leave for a less stressful vocation. Housing, do I even need to
start on housing? The people preaching to you about spending money on the NHS,
Schools and Housing aren’t suddenly about to change their political beliefs and
become socialists because of Brexit. They are the same people who have been
pushing through bills for six years to do exactly the opposite.
And who voted for those bills? I certainly didn’t. About 24%
of those eligible to vote chose Conservative at the last election, they needed
the Lib Dems to jump into bed with them in 2010, and since then they’ve been
left to make all the decisions for us. In fact, as ever, many of the laws they
pushed through were conveniently left out of their manifestoes or they had
explicitly promised they wouldn’t, only to change their minds once in
parliament (Lib Dems and tuition fees, tories and their tax credits cuts) but
once they had power there was nothing we could do to stop them. In the UK we
have an unelected House of Lords. An unelected Head of State. Tens of thousands
take to the streets to protest austerity and aren’t acknowledged. And yet all I
keep hearing from Leave campaigners is that we are some great Democracy that
the EU needs to learn from.
It is all a lie to give us the impression that we will get
any say whatsoever on the future of our country other than choosing between
Labour and Tory at the next election, and we’ll have a vote in a once in a
generation referendum of some sort. The Leave campaign seems focussed squarely
on emotive language and an attitude that we are Great Britain, we are better
than everyone else, we can go it alone, have some faith, believe in Britain etc
etc which is founded on absolutely nothing. Whenever the Remain campaign points
to the fact that pretty much every single independent study, every single
independent expert says leaving the EU would be a huge risk which would cost
the country billions, all Leave can come up with is “well experts have got it
wrong in the past before, have some faith.” That isn’t faith, it’s blind faith.
At least give us something to think about. “Just have faith” is what religious
people say when trying to convert you. But this isn’t faith in Jesus Christ,
miracle worker, Son of God, Carpenter and all round top bloke, it’s faith in
Nigel Farage, the BNP, Kelvin Mackenzie, Katie Hopkins, Boris Johnson, Michael
Gove, Donald Trump and The Sun.
Not one person, propaganda video, politician or leaflet has
come up with a plausible reason why leaving the EU would benefit any of us. I
have read a lot about how neither campaign has been particularly convincing,
which I actually agree with. Having to support David Cameron has been deeply
unpleasant. However on such a massive decision for the future of our country
surely the emphasis is with the Leave campaign to give us an actual, solid
reason to vote out?
This isn’t all to say that the EU is perfect. It is just to
say that there is no good reason to leave it. It is to say that we are better
off addressing the shortcomings of the EU than to abandon it altogether and put
the future of the UK in jeapordy. It has been at times (I think deliberately) a
messy and confusing debate. It is hard for people to get to the bottom of the
pros and cons because there is nobody giving a measured argument. A lot of good
people more intelligent than I am are voting out, but I can’t help but feel it
is based more on a combination of jingoistic, idealistic reasons rather than the
reality that faces us.
Voting for Brexit won’t turn Britain into an old Ealing film
where we all walk around saying “good day” to eachother while wearing top hats
and leaving our front doors unlocked. It won’t turn Britain into somewhere that
actually produces goods again, we have long since sold everything off. It won’t
turn Britain into an immigrant free zone. It won’t mean the army stand on the
white cliffs of dover looking out for any incoming migrant boats. It won’t mean
we get any more of a say than we already do in decisions made in parliament. It
won’t mean the threat of terrorism will disappear. It won’t mean that the
government will start caring about the NHS again. It won’t mean they’ll reverse
all of the privatisation and cheap sell offs that have cost the country
millions. It won’t mean they’ll start acting on fair taxation for big
businesses and it certainly won’t mean they will suddenly start caring about
working class people again. What it would turn Britain into is an isolated
little Island, pretending it’s the good old days, with its head in the sand, lead
into the unknown by Boris f*cking Johnson.
