It’s Hard To Get Excited About An Unnecessary Referendum

But I’m going to vote for the future rather than an imaginary past

As a member of the Labour Party, I received in the snail mail today my window poster for Vote Remain. Like many people in the UK at the moment, I believe, I’m closer to apathy than passionate about either leaving or remaining. This referendum is really an unnecessary distraction from the slash and burn economics of this government. The only upside is that the Tories are fighting tooth and nail on both sides of the argument and therefore against each other. That cannot bode well for party unity, no matter what the result of the referendum may be.

For the rest of us, it comes down to trying to decide which of the neoliberal gangs has the worst members. On balance that appears to be the leave camp. Their politics appear nastier, if that were possible, than even those of Cameron and Osborne on the remain side. The focus of the ‘leave’ campaign appears to be on an alternative past in which the poor were happy with their lot and only white people lived in Britain. Their lies on the financial aspects of leaving or staying are more brazen, too. Once again, we get to see how Tory lies remain unchallenged by the bulk of the mainstream media, which is always an education. Given that the Tories in both camps will continue to wage an incessant war on education, we need to find education where we can.

The secret negotiations around TTIP and the treatment of Greece were, for a time, things that had me leaning towards voting leave. That the Tories will sign TTIP — and probably make sure the NHS is not excluded from the privatisation provision of the trade agreement (or ‘partnership’) — no matter whether we are in or out of Europe makes that a moot point. The Greece problem is one of the single currency and the dominance of German banks and their export-led economy. The EU should, of course, be leaning on the Germans to back off and the recent rumblings from the IMF — part of the infamous Troika that imposed and continues to impose punitive and self-defeating austerity on Greece — that austerity is not, after all, an economic necessity but an ideological choice that it is ultimately counter-productive raises the hope that neoliberalism might start to be undermined from within.

And if the UK is outside the EU, we will then be cursed — for a few years at least — with a government that has free rein to sell off the rest of our public services to their cronies and to wreak havoc on the NHS and the remainder of the welfare state.

There is also the argument — perhaps a siren call — that it’s only possible to change things for the better from within. This is what underpins DiEM25, the movement created by, among others, Yanis Varoufakis, the economist and former Greek finance minister. The hope of democracy across Europe that drives the membership of DiEM25, along with the members of Momentum and the Labour Party who believe that Britain will, on balance, benefit by remaining within the EU is what clinches the argument for me. I will vote to Remain.

But I’m not really one to put posters in windows.