I am strongly a remain voter; I hope that we can change the EU by maintaining a seat at the table. Don’t shoot me down, just consider me an optimist.
90% of my friends are remain. University educated, born 1970’s, middle class — yes we have issues with the older generation pulling up draw bridges, times are tougher for our generation, but we have all seen the benefits of co-operating with friends from across Europe.

The best conversations I have had have been with the 10%; always well reasoned and articulate. Good reasons, well thought out and articulated; they reflect slightly different personal priorities and areas of cynicism. Never any love lost.

My work also takes me to the other part of Britain. I loved my three days in Boston recently, working right in the market place, it felt so European. Trips to the slums of Morecambe, Barrow on Furness and Blackpool recently paint quite another picture; places with little prospect at the far end of England which are nice for 6 weeks in the summer, but desolate the other 46. I grew up in Torbay, and realised these towns become benefits traps; if you are on benefits then you may as well live somewhere nice… however there is little prospect of meaningful long-term employment here. The school friends I met up with last week all left to go to university, and never went home again.

Your father articulates so well what I have seen; where the divide in the UK lies; the class fracture lines that us chattering pesto-eating politically-active middle classes have failed to address since 1978 when I first appreciated what politics was. My son is the age I was then, and he is starting to be aware of the political landscape around him; I hope we can always show so much respect for each others points of view.

I remain an optimist; I think come Christmas the political landscape in the UK will be far more progressive as a result of this. I dare say the under-classes will resent the middle classes seeming merely to shuffle deck chairs.

Whether we leave or not, the EU looks set to implode next year. My reading is that most people like the concept of the trading arrangements, the compatibility of laws, the exchange of skills and expertise, the shared valuing of social protection. Can a new European project emerge which replaces the much hated unaccountable bureaucracy with something more streamlined, recognising the shared values and individual needs of the various nations? We do need to put in place measures to stop the capital rich pitting the workers against each other in a race to the bottom, but that ought to be a matter of social justice, not of xenophobic knee jerk reaction. If the folk of Lincolnshire had modest prosperity, then the annual influx of a migrant workforce to help for the few weeks of harvest each year might be something to celebrate.

I remain an optimist, and your father would be welcome in my 10%.