The Quiet Majority

Dear Remainers,

I wanted to get down some thoughts in response to the hundreds of messages I’ve seen which essentially call me out as ‘a bigot, racist, selfish, arrogant, self righteous, idiotic, uneducated, European hater’, all because I voted to leave the EU. Of course, none of this is directed specifically at me (yet…), but indirectly.

Can we just stop for a moment? Take a breath. Remember what some of our parents and grandparents fought for. I believe it was democracy. I believe it was to save us from the tyranny of dictatorship.

What’s happening now, what’s coming from many of those who ‘woke up to a selfish, racist Britain’ on Friday morning is totally undemocratic.

I ask myself, had the decision gone the other way, how would I have reacted? Well to be honest, I, much like most people, expected it to go the way of remain, but as someone who generally is in the minority when it comes to political and religious beliefs, I’m quite used to accepting ‘the other’ decision, and hopefully with some grace.

I wish there was more grace going around the remain camp.

We don’t always get the decision we want but we have a vote (at least those of us over 18). Many on June 23rd 2016, exercised that right, in fact 72.2% of the population. But the loud minority cannot accept the result of a democratic process.

There’s two key pieces of irony here: Firstly, the EU was set up to promote democracy throughout Europe. A noble aim -and in my book a good aim. A criteria for joining is that you must have a democratic form of government and there are repercussions for any member who’s government veers away from democracy. This is a core founding principle of the EU. So it’s ironic that the very people that want to stay in the club –at least those calling for another referendum, are failing at the first hurdle you need to join.

Secondly, it’s also ironic the outpouring of hatred towards the British people who ‘chose’ to leave the EU, by the very people complaining about the vile, hatred and bigotry brexiters apparently have against everyone else.

I should make one thing clear at this point. I do not watch the news and I certainly do not have any rolling news channels -whether on TV or radio- assaulting my eyes and ears. I haven’t done so for years. Now that’s not to say there aren’t some wonderful and well researched programs worth watching, but I do not see the need to watch and hear endless rhetoric, negativity and fear mongering especially during an election/referendum campaign that does nothing to help in these often complex matters and in fact does much to confuse.

I’ve not subjected myself to any of the TV debates –which I’m reliably informed had politicians of both sides avoiding answering any questions of worth and who seemed to go against their own deeply held principles to feed their own personal agendas.

My news was received online in long form from a variety of outlets including The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sun, The FT along with BBC. I’m not saying that these were always better or any different than what I could have received from TV channels, but at least I was in control of what I read, as with TV it’s all too easy to sit and consume.

I wish I had spent more time encouraging others to avoid the TV headlines and choose to look at a range of views.

But then again…many people I spoke to were struggling to make a decision. Understandable, in what as mentioned is a complex and a once-in-a-generation decision. There was a lot of pressure to make ‘the right’ decision that would not only affect our generation, but more importantly affect our children and their children. Not a decision to be made lightly. So naturally many felt the need to soak up as much coverage as possible searching for that glimmer of hope convincing them to vote one way or another. I get that.

For me however, it was always only ever going to be one option. I never wavered. I don’t say that to brag. It simply came down to one principle for me. What do I believe was the best way from the two options provided for a nation state to be governed? By a partly unelected and partly unaccountable EU or by the nation state itself making it’s own decisions about it’s own future? No brainer as far as I’m concerned. People had fought long and hard to give us the right to decide our countries’ direction of travel, not for us to give it up so easily.

But a few things need to be addressed here. Lets start with ‘partly unelected and partly unaccountable’. The usual kickback poured over this is ‘isn’t the House of Lords just the same?’ Really? Is that your comeback? Just because we already have one layer of unelected leaders, doesn’t mean we have to have another on top. Let’s deal with the former, then look to reform the latter.

The second is ‘isn’t my MEP elected?’ Yes. But they have very limited power and cannot propose laws and regulations. This is the domain of the unelected European Commission as Jeremy Paxman points out in his documentary in May.

Thirdly, just because I have this opinion of the EU, does it mean that I hate everything the EU stands for and I am insular and want to live in a silo detached from any other country? In a word, no.

The EU has done remarkable things. I was in Kosovo in 2003 some four years after the end of the war and saw firsthand the positive effect –at least on infrastructure– that EU money had.

I visited the most bombed out city of the campaign but you would not have known it by the sheer scale of the rebuilding work that had been carried out in those four years. To me at least, this was a good thing.

I work within the creative industries and a lot of wonderful works of creativity and businesses have been funded with money from the EU.

I also know my friends in the science world have benefitted greatly from both EU funding and collaboration with others across Europe and are now wondering how projects will be funded in future.

This is not a naive decision that ignores all of the other issues for some act of self service. This is an eyes-wide-open decision knowing ‘there will be trouble ahead’.

Do I have answers for the above issues? No I don’t. I can’t tell you where creative industries funding will come from. I can’t say where funding for science projects will come from. But what I can tell you is that creativity and science did not start with the formation of the EU. I think we had quite a few scientific breakthroughs, collaborations and works of art before then and we will have many more in a future outside the EU.

I obviously have a much more positive view of my fellow men and women, in that I have every confidence within this global society (not just Europe centric), collaboration will happen and funding will be found. It will just be harder to access (at least initially) than we have been used to in recent years.

There’s another straw man that also needs to be mentioned. Let’s bring in the hot-potato of immigration. You know what? This really isn’t an issue for me. In fact, If I had my way (and be thankful I’m not in government) I would have open borders for people to come and go as they please. Yes, we’d need a different kind of society to deal with that, but that’s what I’d love to work towards.

However, it has to be said there are those within the leave camp (just as their are in the remain camp) who are xenophobic and wilfully ignorant. I’m not defending them. I’m not even interested in them. This is about those of us who are intelligent, forward thinking, compassionate, gracious and not self-serving.

That’s all the time I want to give this issue as it really didn’t play any part in my decision to vote leave and was not the main issue for many ‘leavers’ I spoke to.

By the way, just so you know, I’m a black British forty something man born in England to Christian Caribbean parents who came over to the UK in the 60s, answering the call to help out with England’s growing healthcare demands. But never-mind the details. You’d be forgiven for thinking I’ve obviously got too comfortable with my Britishness that I apparently loathe anyone else who wants to enter this wonderful country of ours.

But let me return to justifying my position. No-one who voted ‘leave’ really needs to justify their position anymore than those who voted remain. I’ve seen posts with people asking Mark Zuckerberg to try and find those on Facebook who voted leave as no-one can seem to find them. Seriously!

But, whilst no one need justify their democratic right to vote (there’s a reason why it’s called a ‘secret ballot’ and as one friend of mine wisely said, ‘my vote is my voice’), I still feel, enough is enough and a counter position needs to be put across to the bigoted, prejudiced labels hailed at all of us leavers.

For all those brexiters who have said to me ‘I’m scared people are going to see me in the same light as the extremist nationalist parties’, for all those to whom the remainers are ‘apologising on behalf of’, for all those who are supposedly ‘caught up in prejudice’ and ‘unable to see beyond their small and insular horizon’, for those who have been labelled as ‘being manipulated by the xenophobic, racist and above all incorrect facts’, for those who are dismissed as imbeciles with quotes like ‘if it was raining soup, they’d come out with forks’ and for those who are ashamed of all of us whose only crime is that we exercised our democratic right to vote: we didn’t write the ballot paper. It was not us who chose the options but we did chose where to mark the cross. Though we didn’t shout about it because we are the quiet majority.

Yours sincerely
The unashamed brexiter