What did you do in the Great Campaign, Daddy?
I’ve been feeling guilty about the EU Referendum.
It’s probably the most important political decision of my lifetime. It’s certainly on a matter I care about. But other than occasional tweets and a couple of arguments on social media, I’ve not really pitched in.
I worry that 24 June will come and I’ll feel I let my side down, and let my kids’ future down.
So why am I not getting involved?
Time? I’m always busy running a business — though am I a regular businessman whom Gove loves or a European elite whom he hates? But at the same time, I’m not working all the time. I could do some campaigning — I could at least write.
Day-job? There are some restrictions on what I can say and do because I run a politically-neutral organisation, but I have recused myself from any of our work around the referendum, so I could do a bit more than normal.
I think it’s because the referendum has been so joyless and attritional. Project fear meets project scare, like a brainstorming session at Monsters Inc. Facts, logic and argument seem almost irrelevant, when the other side is pushing a big lie and anti-immigrant nationalism.
There isn’t space for positivity. I’m realistic enough to know that any campaign that appealed to me with a jolly pro-Europeanism would lose by thirty points. You can’t undo twenty years of political atmosphere in three months.
So what I want to see — an open, united Europe where nations work together and a networked democracy brings people power into every major decision — is not up for discussion. It’s not even on the ballot paper.
By voting Remain, as I will, I’m voting against the core of my politics, an “ever closer union between the peoples of Europe”. Referendums make hypocrites of us all, and it’s hard to be enthused by being a hypocrite.
So I worry. I worry I’m too self-centred, not willing to submerge my own views in the interests of the greater cause. I worry about the final result, but without feeling I can affect it, like a end-of-season game that could condemn my team to relegation.
I come back to writing. By writing, at least, I can put my opinions forward, and maybe help the positive case that some of us want to see. At the least, I can describe something that I will fight for, whether from Britain or elsewhere, come Leave or Remain. That’s what I’ll try to do over the next twenty days.
