For what it’s worth I’m reluctantly voting Remain.
1) I’m selfish about access to travel in Europe and want to keep that free movement.
2) The status quo is less hassle in the short-term and those voting to leave have been badly under-sold how messy the process will get. Imagine if all the paperwork was given to Southern Rail. Seriously, that bad.
3) And I’m scared of the ugly-as-hell alliance of devout far-right nationalism and cynical centre-right careerism that unhooked itself from truthfulness in cavalier fashion in order to win. Incredibly dangerous. Trumpedy trumpedy trump they go.
These aren’t good reasons: my vote turns out to be selfish, short-termist and taken in fear. Brilliant. And in that way, perhaps irrevocably, creeping into everybody, this shoddy binary option that none of us understand does us all great harm. The normalisation of the lowest common denominator.
The complicated lies of Remain campaigns were more sophisticated and subtle than the rampant lies of Leave campaigns – and not such fuel for xenophobic hatred – but they were lies nonetheless.
A curse on both campaigns. A curse on all who swallowed such unmitigated crap, mugged by the most obvious dodgy dealers in the world. And a curse on me. So it goes.
Hi Chris. I Agree Twitter was not the correct medium, so here’s my response:
This read to me like you were saying that you haven’t been spoon-fed the message you want, so you’ve pretty much given up on the whole thing. You’ve reluctantly chosen ‘remain’, seemingly because you’ve chosen to look no further than the narrow confines of a debate that ignores the enormity and gravity of its actual subject.
You are right, the mainstream debate on this has been woeful, but I would expect someone of your level of political engagement to look beyond the machinations of the tiny fragment of the insular right wing clique that got us into this mess in the first place. Indeed you nearly do, but you then you diminish it. Fear of the far-right is not a selfish reason to vote for something: it is a legitimate concern for the wellbeing of others. Our continent, indeed our world is drifting dangerously towards small-minded isolationism, encouraged by the vested interests of corporations who find smaller governments much more easily persuadable (some might say blackmail-able). Democracy is a massively inefficient tool to counter corruption and despotism, but it is the only one we have, and the more people who engage with that democracy, the harder it is for a single organisation to control. We disengage from that kind of safety net at out peril. We can disengage by walking away completely and setting ourselves (and most likely our neighbours) on a path to nationalist isolation, or we can disengage by dismissing the whole process as imperfect and therefore not worth our time.
In this sense, the only selfish thing about your post is its tendency to encourage others towards disengagement. If we chose not to engage with our political institutions in the hope of improving them (regardless of how imperfect they are), then we may as well leave them. You complain about a mealy-mouthed debate but offer nothing but a mealy-mouthed response. You only get out what you put in.