A Small Glimmer of Optimism
If life has taught me anything, in my brief 19 or so years of it, it is that this too shall pass and something inexplicably more interesting and exciting will present itself. However, it feels like the future is having a hard time manifesting itself and we seem to be stuck in a rut of lunacy, ignorance and overwhelming incompetence. Admittedly it is somewhat difficult for me to interpret current affairs due to my relatively short period of awareness of macroscopic events. I often ask myself, Is this normal? Is this just another phase that will pass? Or is a more profound change occurring while most of us are asleep at the wheel?
From my perspective, it seems like we live in a worrying time. Our leaders lack leadership, our planet is slowly dying and no one seems to care, and there is an increasing loud group of people in society trying to drag us back to a time where Britain was riddled with Polio and Measles, yet it was somehow our period of greatness. If it was not clear before this piece is about Brexit. I believe that Britain leaving the EU will profoundly ruin this country. You may disagree with that and I welcome your opinion and always appreciate debate (a battle-hardened opinion is stronger than a fresh one) but if you believe that Brexit will lead to a great renaissance in British society, then I’m afraid there are a lot of facts that beg to differ. However, I don’t want to use this piece to simply state facts, they’ve already been pretty much universally ignored by the Prime Minister and her Cabinet. Instead I want to make a case for reversing our decision democratically and encouraging further integration with other European nations.
The European Union is a flawed, yet successful institution. I will be the first to admit it has flaws that make it pretty difficult to like, however its achievements pale these concerns to insignificance. The fact that there hasn’t been a war on the most militarised continent for 70 years is astounding. It took two world wars and the worst genocide in our planet’s history to make us realise that bombing each other and murdering civilians maybe isn’t the best way to get your neighbours to be friendly. With a success that great who knows what we could achieve if we worked together on more issues of our time?
The EU has standardised industry across the continent and made products that all of us use, even you dear reader, cheaper and more accessible. Want a cheap desk for your new place? Head to IKEA for a cheap option made in Bulgaria from wood forested in Poland. This does present problems for a developed nation like Britain, the cost of labour in our country makes manufacturing cheap, mass produced consumer goods almost impossible compared to cheap competition from eastern European nations. What strikes me as odd is how a lot of people who support Brexit jump on the bandwagon to complain about this loss of manufacturing jobs, yet they don’t seem to care as the browse the news on their Chinese made iPhone, sitting on a Hungarian made chair in a coffee shop sipping a hot drink from a Spanish made mug. It perplexes me, I find myself thinking, mate if you really cared why don’t you just boycott products made in cheap labour markets? This sort of standardisation brought about by the EU can have a negative effect on the manufacturing industry in developed countries like Britain, but then so can the tory party. And anyway, the EU helps to create jobs in Britain in more skilled and better paid sectors of the economy.
But I can tell I’ve already bored you just like the Remain campaign did two years ago. So, moving swiftly onto my next argument. I’ll admit at this point in the evening I’ve run out of coffee and my creativity feels like its weaning but hey ho, life could be worse. We should feel a sense of pride in our place at the European table. Britain, while not a founding member, helped to create some of the institutions the EU was founded on after the second world war. The EU has helped parts of our nation that successive governments choose to ignore. Regional development grants have helped rebuild post industrial towns in parts of our country the Tories can’t be bothered helping. In their mind the south of Wales, Scottish Hebrides and Northern English cities never vote for them so why bother trying to end poverty and rebuild communities there when they can’t even be civilised enough to vote tory. The EU, on the other hand, has a different perspective. Everyone in a member state is an EU citizen so is entitled to their rights, a decent life and a place to live of a comparable standard to other places in the EU. I honestly believe this idea would be seen as so revolutionary at the tory party conference that, if announced by the prime minister as the new policy of the party, it would seriously harm membership numbers, by giving a lot of the geriatric members heart attacks.
It’s hard to argue against giving people more power through direct democracy. There are fatal flaws in direct democracy however referendums can give governments legitimacy when answering difficult questions. It is for this reason that I am baffled as to why Theresa May has not sought legitimacy for her plan for leaving the EU. Surely a referendum would settle the question on what sort of Brexit the British people would like to see, if any given the recent revelations about food shortages, medicine shortages, economic decline, job losses, aviation concerns and the general misery Brexit would bring.
Anyway, despite all facts, reasons and logical arguments society can throw at them, it seems like the government is determined to leave the EU and to stick one to them by screwing up our economy. That’ll really show them we mean business, what will the Germans do when they can’t sell their globally popular cars to a nation of 66 million. They’ll buckle, or at least they will in the minds or tory back benchers. It seems like no amount of reason or sense will change some people’s mind. I would like to leave you with some hope dear reader, the centre of opinion does appear to be shifting and I feel with a big push we could once again get an opportunity to democratically change our future. I think there will be a Second referendum to settle some seemingly unanswerable questions and I hope that we choose to show solidarity with our European friends and I hope a year after I finish writing this we’ll all still be citizens of Europe.
