How to cast your vote in the Referendum
Will you decide using the facts? Have you selected your facts yet? How do you know they are correct? How do you know you have all the relevant ones?
Facts in themselves do not persuade anyone. Properly understanding the facts is what moves us to respond. Ask someone who has quit smoking.
An oft-quoted ‘fact’ says, ‘The country is too small and is so overcrowded that there is no room for more immigrants to come in.’ Have you been to mid-Wales recently?
An oft-quoted ‘fact’ says, ‘Too many migrants mean I can’t get to see my doctor’. You can’t get to see your doctor because there are not enough doctors and too many doctors give up because of government policies that make life too difficult for them.
An oft-quoted ‘fact’ says, ‘I can’t get a house because all the immigrants push up prices and I am shoved to the bottom of the heap’. Government policies reduced the amount of house building that ought to have taken place over the past fifteen years and even without any immigrants there would not be enough houses.
Some months ago I was waiting for my annual flu jab and overheard a couple sitting further down the line from me. “They say this flu jab is a waste of time this year. It doesn’t work,” the woman said. “I know” the man said. “They make the jabs in foreign countries so they are useless. Anyway, them immigrants bring in so many diseases that none of them jabs do the job anymore.”
Test that ‘fact’ with the razor sharp probe of exposure to reality, or sit in total confusion as you work out if you are hearing a pair of comedians rehearsing their stage act.
According to the news, most people have made up their minds about how to vote. No amount of contradictory arguments, distorted facts or clever lies will bring them to change. Yet in private conversations, many people I know are saying they are still undecided, with less than twenty-four hours to go.
How could they be undecided considering all the razzmatazz and bullshit that has been filling our screens and dominating the airwaves? The most common answer to that question when I ask is, ‘I don’t trust any of the politicians on either side. They lie, they act in their best interests, they are controlled by the multinationals and they lobby for what suits their profits.’ That is some indictment of our politicians that will need to be addressed no matter which side wins in Thursday’s vote.
In quiet conversations (how rare those have been on the topic of the Referendum), most admit to being inclined to Remain. Ask them ‘why’ and they tell me, ‘This all started because Farage threatened the Conservative party at the last election and they had to promise this vote even though nobody asked for it. We are doing well as a country. The EU gives us some protection against ideologically driven right wing politicians. We have a responsibility to others on the planet that goes beyond xenophobic self-interest. No country except North Korea wants to have total national sovereignty. World problems are too large to be solved by individual countries isolating themselves and acting on their own.’ A unusual but compelling combination of facts, values and moral insights.
Point to the arguments for ‘better out’ and the unanimous answer is ‘I don’t want to risk all we have achieved because some rich tosser says it would be best for us (him!) to leave. We can stay in and have the best of both worlds even with weaknesses in the EU because we will be powerful enough to sort them. Leave, is like evacuating a ship in a storm. We run all the risks with little guarantee that help will arrive. The rescue will not be down to our efforts but to the good will of those who happen to be passing. While we are waiting in the water the sharks will be circling as we wait for the rescue boats to appear.’
A shipwrecked sailor clinging to the debris of his sinking ship is not a strong image on which to build a future.
The leavers got one thing right – this vote is about who runs the country.
I want to live in a country where real people (stop calling them ‘ordinary’) can live sensible lives, cared for irrespective of their age or social status, in an environment that is fit for all those who chose to live here, where my grandchildren have a future, where being responsible is rewarded, with leaders who play a key role in reshaping the EU to be the best it can be, in a country taking its rightful place as a world leader in pursuing the universal good.
I do not want it run by a group of unrestrained right-wing ideologues soaked in self-interest and nestled in the pocket of multinationals, where the NHS will be dismantled so quickly we will not know what happened, where schools are misshaped to fit fantasy fiction on how best to improve them, where those with disabilities are refused help because the form filling was stacked against them, where the poor carry the unbalanced burden of austerity and live off charity, while those milking the system sail away in their yachts with their mountains of ill-gotten gains, justified by their mouthpiece lawyers on the grounds, ‘I did not act outside the law’.
We are not curators of the past, but creators of the future. Remaining in the EU gives us a solid base on which to start creating our future.
