It will come as no surprise to most of my friends, and probably a great many other people too, that I am an enthusiastic supporter of remaining in the EU because I believe it is Better for Me, Better for my Country and Better for the World
The Leave campaign like to portray those who think remaining are all negative, scared, or even hating their country. That could not be further from the truth.I am supporting Remain, because I think it is the right thing to do.
Yes it is personal. Today inside the EU we all have the right to move and work freely across an area larger than at any time since (and including) the Roman Empire. I have used that right and value it very highly. I also value those people who use it to come and work here.
I think economically we are better off as part of larger whole that facilitates the largest, and most open market in the world.That is good for me as a regular citizen and good for me as someone in business. I remember vividly some of the challenges that used to be faced before the Single Market became reality as well as the challenge today of doing business across far less friendly borders. I do not want us to go back to that.
I want to live in a country that is open to people and ideas not one scared of the other, the foreigner. Here I have been frankly shocked and even at times scared by the rhetoric used by the Leave campaign. A relentless focus on immigration as bad, pictures of hoards waiting to invade. I am not one of those and never will be On a personal, quite visceral level I ally with those who support and celibate people, and oppose those who see them as a threat.
It is common to see Sovereignty and phrases like “Take Back Control” as a reason for leaving the EU. It is even far from uncommon to see it portrayed as some sort of evil empire of foreigners out to deprive us of our freedoms. I just do not buy that. We live in a country that is far from perfect. Our messy constitution hands unlimited power to a parliament made up of one house where the government is usually formed representing not much more than a third of the population and a second house formed from political appointees, hereditary accidents of birth and Bishops of a state church. Democratic it is not. The record of that parliament in upholding our freedoms is poor. Freedom of Speech has been eroded with criminal sanctions for saying the wrong thing online. There are laws in progress that would enable mass surveillance on a routine. Leaving would not be “taking back control”, it would just be removing a few of the checks and balances that help preserve some of our freedoms.
The EU is not perfect in its governance either, but in contrast to the evil empire it is sometimes portrayed, all of its institutions are held to account by a combination of national governments working together and a parliament we directly elect. Yes there are changes I would like to see in the EU, but there are far more I would like to see in our own constitution. Leaving would just free up those who hide behind the language of liberty, even more freedom to trash our freedom and liberty. The EU alone is not enough to stop them, but it certainly helps and I for one do not want to lose the extra protection it gives.
I am from the generation no-one has never really been given a slick marketing name for - too young to be a Boomer, too old to be Gen-X, I like to think of it as Generation Punk. i do not remember the Second World War, but I do vividly recall the Cold War and the Iron Curtain that ran across Europe. I remember seeing that very Iron Curtain made manifest in the barbed wire, concrete and machine guns that were the Berlin Wall.
The precursors to today’s EU were set up by people of vision after WW2 who realised that if Europe were ever going to avoid tearing itself apart again it needed a different way of living together where arbitrary borders matter less than a system where people live, work, trade and depend on each other. Winston Churchill captured some of that in his speech setting out a vision for a United States of Europe, so did the founders of the modern German Federal Republic and many more. They envisaged what has variously been called a family, a Community, a Union, not a super state - because they were wary of attempts to build single over-arching state - but also more than a collection of competing states with no institutions to bind them and no ways of ultimately resolving differences beyond conflict. In most ways the EU has surpassed the dreams of those founders to a degree where we now view wars between powers in Europe as unthinkable.
When the Iron Curtain fell, what was the first thing most of the new democracies wanted to do? It was join the EU. An institution that in its founding and accession documents requires a commitment to plural democratic government and common standards of liberty and justice. Tellingly, the one part of Europe that did not embrace those commitments at once - Yugoslavia - degenerated into a nasty civil war. Thankfully that is now a quarter of a century ago and the region is at peace, and slowly the states of the region, rebuilt in large part due to help from the EU, are joining their cousins within it. For those still outside the strength it gives them to be part of the bigger whole hardly even warrants thoughts of the problems. Unlike the negative posters of the Leave campaign, I will be celebrating then Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia all finally join.
Last year I travelled across Europe by train. Through and across the old Berlin Wall, across lines between countries that were invisible. No barbed wire, no watch towers, no men in uniforms demanding your papers. If that does not represents one of the greatest achievements of people working together, I really do not know what does.
There are many other things that come up in this debate - security, regulations, practicalities of leaving, different possible models of relationships after if we left even the NHS, I have not covered. Not because I do not have views on them - if you know me, or follow what I post you know do - but because most of them will just be used as supporting evidence for whatever side of the debate someone is on.
in the end for me it is simple and personal. I like having multiple overlapping identities. I feel East Anglian. I feel English. I feel British. I feel European. I want to live in a place that recognises those identities in positive ways. In the end I support what the EU stands for in working together and want to be part of a greater whole, not part of nation state that pulls up the drawbridge.
That’s why I have voted to Remain.
titsay
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
kaledo-art
