Heading North

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Well I had a fabulous time in Wellington, great seeing, Lizzie, Jack, Gina and Tim. The experience of seeing the All Blacks was really as good as I had hoped and I am genuinely happy to say that I truly like my family, it was a fabulous weekend. So here I am at gate 31 in the departure lounge awaiting my flight back to Auckland and it s Blog time again. I have been asked about Brexit more than once so here goes:

For me, being in the European Union represented something else beyond being in an economic trading block. It represented a recognition that World war 2 was over, that the Empire was over, It represented an openness toward people from all over the world, not just Europe. For me personally being in the EU was symbolic of being forward looking and optimistic. It was not about Magda from Poland or Ion from Romania coming and taking an English job, it was about Elliot from Tadcaster and Scott from Ashington being able to take up employment in Stuttgart or study in Malmo. In my mind, the English Channel was analagous to the Berlin Wall, being part of the EU was an equivalent to the wall being torn down. Also economically it was a market that allowed for strength in numbers.

I am not Anti American by a long way, so this little polemic is not about throwing stones at Uncle Sam, but any country which does dot look after its own citizens needs has a government which is not performing its basic duty. So the reality is, any deals with the Americans are deals which will be one sided in favour of the bigger party. The essence of any deal is “I give away something I don’t really care about in exchange for getting something from you that I want, as cheaply as possible” As a big voice within the EU we were in a position to influence policies and drive hard bargains with America which were truly bilateral. The UK on its own I do not believe will have the clout and the power to do so. Now of course that is where myself and the remainers differ, the leavers believe that Britain is a world superpower which freed from EU membership can strike up better deals with America and Japan than currently exist.

The leavers believe Britain will be freed from an “undemocratic dictatorship” and that leaving will herald a golden age of wealth and prosperity and freedom. I don’t want to patronise the people who voted leave by saying they are stupid or racist. There is no doubt that not everyone who voted leave is a racist, although probably every racist voted leave. We have endured a 40 year drip drip drip of anti European, xenophobic propaganda from the press, many of the stories, blatant lies.

But it is striking that the vote demographic is definitely one in which the older you are the more likely you were to vote leave, but sorry kids, the youth dont vote. So why did the elderly vote Leave?

I would argue that for most of us our childhoods up to our mid twenties are a golden period in our memories. Even if they are not really so good….we remember them as beautiful…..its when we had adventures….its when we first fell in love….first kissed a lover like a lover. The opportunities are endless….we are healthy and fit and free

So the older people remember pre EU days as being beautiful and simple….and equate the happiness of youth with being outside the EU. Also historical nationalistic pride, I am sorry to say there remains a “we won the war” attitude and our press fuelled that. Perhaps I am negative and pessimistic and Britain remains a world player who is the equal to the USA and Russia and China militarily and economically.

Then we have the complexity of society in 2016 compared to before 1973. We are not guaranteed work….we dont have a job for life. Society is not monolithic…families are not bread winning father…adoring wife and 3 children….we have complex families..we have black…white….asian neighbours. Women are no longer expected to be passive and pretty. My lover no longer has to be of the opposite sex. Life is more complicated and diverse and the changes are accelerating.

I believe for many voting leave was a yearning for an earlier simpler time.

As long as i remember, the press , have had a negative attitude…stories appear which are lies. “The EU wants ban bananas” “crazy EU demand Brits drive on the right” EU demand queen has to wear a crash helmet when riding in her carriage……these were genuine stories that appeared in the press….every day for 40 years.

Voting leave was also simple plain xenophobia….an objection to hearing people speaking Italian and not being ice cream sellers or waiters, discomfort with seeing polish or czech people, plain simple racism.

Brexit was also a vote against the government, against the wealthy, against the banks, the stock market and the elite. It wad a vote of discontent and unhappiness On a recent television report about Brexit, I heard an MP mention the people in their constituency who voted Remain and how their views had been totally ignored during the months of debate; that the closeness of the result had never been reflected in any kind of ‘reaching out’ or consensus and how the ‘will of the people’ was turned around to mean the will of the 52% who turned out to vote. If we look at the numbers we see that 46.5m people were able to vote of whom 17.4 voted Leave and 16.1m voted Remain, which left 12.9m who didn’t vote at all. Thus, the idea that the ‘majority of the British people’ supported Leave is, and has always been, wrong. The Tory Party, however, thought it best to ignore this inconvenient truth in the hope they could ride the populist wave of Leavers and become the party of the people that UKIP were threatening to become. Unluckily for them they completely misunderstood how such a compromised and close result would reflect itself in parliament. Accordingly, Theresa May’s deal or variations thereof, Boris Johnson’s threats of a no deal or any other Tory Leave strategy just don’t satisfy anyone on either side of the debate. Whether we leave with a deal or not or remain in limbo , the fact remains this has always been a Tory Brexit designed to keep the Tory Party from fragmenting. There was no grand idea about what Brexit was; no one presented a vision of what Britain could be outside of Europe. Mainly because none of this mattered in the least. Hence all the cliched talk of ‘taking our country back’, blue passports, bendy bananas, and less immigration. Not forgetting the lies about how the NHS would benefit from a Leave windfall of £350m a week. It didn’t help that parts of the Tory Party had also begun to believe that the kind of extremism as expressed by Donald Trump, among others, could be harnessed as a way of arguing against the perceived nanny-statism of the European project. Working time directives, the European Court of Human Rights, and EU Farming, Fishery and tax directives, among other things, just seemed like the sort of liberal thinking a growing number of libertarians in the Tory Party were beginning to baulk at. In the new nationalist world order, anything that smacked of liberal thinking had somehow been conflated with ‘fake news’ and was no longer to be trusted. In fact, it was to be confronted as violently as possible either online or, tragically, offline. The Tories have, sometimes unconsciously, played up to this nasty plague in the hope that right-wing populism was the edge that they needed either to get their version of Brexit through or to shore up their popularity in the polls. If the last few months have proven anything it’s that this unconscionable tactic Brexit was also a vote against the government, against the wealthy, against the banks, the stock market and the elite. It wad a vote of discontent and unhappiness