Brexit

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.