As an English guy living far from the border, I found the Scottish referendum to be far more heated and vitriol than the European one that has just passed. With regular reports of Scottish voters who dared voice their opinion to remain being verbally abused and attacked for their opinions, shouts of “traitor” and “English scum” filling Twitter and the airways.

I do a fair bit of driving for my work, generally around Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and I drove home yesterday from Norfolk wondering how long it’d take before all of the ‘Leave’ signs were taking down, I also managed to see my first ‘Remain’ sign as well. It really did make me think that after the hundreds of ‘leave’ signs that I had seen up and down the country, I had only seen the one ‘remain’ sign, especially with the remain vote being to keep the status quo.

As the big date was drawing up and I had heard comments on Reddit that the only people wanting to vote leave were right wing racists, Thursday was the first time we had really talked at work about which way we were voting and so many people said they were voting to leave, these weren’t nazis or racists or bigots, people who had had Poles steal their jobs or anything else, these were normal people who just wanted a say. A say in how they were being governed and didn’t like the fact that the people they were voting for were having their ideas and opinions over ruled by people that weren’t elected by anyone. I didn’t decide until I was in the polling booth staring at the paper with pencil in hand, I had heard all the arguments for and against but, decided at the final second to vote for the status quo but not really happy at all with either option. I enjoy diversity and would rather live next door to a happy Italian family than some idiot English people but with the sheer volume of normal people all around Europe growing dis-satisfied with the way Europe is heading, the EU has to change and it’s a shame that the people at the top have only just opened their eyes and said “we need to change”, perhaps if they had said this a few years back, the U.K. would have voted differently.

The UK leaving isn’t because of racists or extremists, it’s because the EU is heading in a direction that more and more people are unhappy with and this was the UK saying “no thank you”.