“People
generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.” — Harper
Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird
I started this post
with a quote from one of my all-time favourite books, To Kill A
Mockingbird. It as applicable now as when it was first published, so this
is what I see, what I hear and what I feel. I don’t expect all my audience to
agree with it but anyone who knows me knows I have strong opinions on the EU,
though it is a flawed and imperfect institution it had potential to be better
and we could have been a catalyst for improvement but due to Europhobia in the
Conservative Party and xenophobia stirred up by UKIP, we are in a mess!
It has been one week
since we voted and chose to leave the EU but we are still in a limbo, a level
of hell that Dante couldn’t envision when he wrote his ‘Inferno’. Our PM
has resigned but will stay on until September 10th or so. We
have an opposition in disarray, fighting over the leadership but ignoring the
membership and the EU looks over at us waiting for us to trigger the Article 50
that we must do to formally negotiate our extraction from them. It is all
silly, damaging to our reputation and our economy and less than 1/3 of the
voting population asked for it. I recognize the democratic value of referendum
but only when the electorate are fairly informed, they weren't. The fact so
many people needed to do google searches of the terms "EU" and
"Brexit" says it all, people voted based on soundbites and emotions,
some of them very ugly indeed!
Racism and racist
attacks are on the rise, hopefully this is a temporary blip due to the racists
(who have always existed) being emboldened by the result, maybe England’s very
poor performance in the Euros will dampen their spirits and they will go back
to grumbling in the pub, talking to themselves when reading The Sun or Daily
Mail and go back to proclaiming their ‘non-racist’ status. One can
hope.
Our economic prowess
(use that word liberally) could be damaged, it is too early to say as we don’t
know, and our politicians don’t know, what arrangements we are going to have,
but companies are already making plans to move offices, staff, branches to
countries within the EU. This could amount to a few thousand overall or a
million or more, we don’t know and our politicians are too busy fighting about
power, not fighting for us and it is shameful.
My parents voted for
Brexit and I’ve now had a lengthy chat with them about my anger and sadness
over it. They are not racists, they never have been and they are angry that I
thought they could be but their decision to vote for Brexit was not objective,
it was emotive and that is not how they brought me up hence my puzzlement.
June 29, 2016
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