EU referendum postscript
So, yesterday Britain went to the polls to vote on whether we wanted to be in or out of the European Union.
The campaign on both sides was pretty woeful, Boris appears to have taken the job as leader of the Brexit campaign in order to bluff the population out of voting Brexit, a fact that most of the media has ignored. I have never seen Boris make so many errors as he did during the campaign, which leads me to believe that he took it on as a favour to Cameron.
Meanwhile the Remain campaign, headed by David Cameron himself, was just as lazy and complacent as their assumption that we in Scotland would be too lazy to consider running our own country.
Hilariously, England and Wales have voted out, and everyone else plus London and the richer cities have voted to remain in. Boris probably had about fifteen minutes to write his speech this morning.
Nobody appears to have planned for a vote to exit, and nobody seems to be able to imagine the UK without the EU. Younger voters have been tweeting all day about the selfish old codgers who supposedly ruined their futures by voting to leave the EU. They have been trained to find someone to hate in response to news that they do not like. Who should it be this week? The fat, the old, the smoker, the drinker, the ehead, the junkie. Whatever floats your boat, it is no fun to actually look at the truth, and it probably takes more than 30 seconds.
There do not seem to be many people willing to discuss it that actually remember what the UK was like before we joined in the first place. In 1975, there was weeks of discussion over whether it was a good idea, huge resistance to doing it, and a large number of people and industries have suffered in order to benefit a few large companies and extremely rich people. These same younger voters know nothing of Britain’s fishing industry, eating British produce when it was in season, or actually being able to get work when you were looking for it instead of endless temporary work whilst you wait to get a job that you are actually trained for. I am by no means suggesting that Britain was paradise, but it was certainly easier for my older siblings, who all benefited from the pre-EU economy, to find gainful and permanent employment than it was for me. Marks and Spencers, for another example, used to sell classic styling made in Britain. We generated domestic income by promoting things ACTUALLY MADE HERE, and people had work.
Driving around Scotland, you can see traces of the industries that have been destroyed since then, by a combination of Westminster policy, EU rulings, and the ability to easily move jobs thanks to a more advanced system which meant that company owners no longer needed to care if they were destroying an entire region by removing thousands of jobs. Kilmarnock made carpets, Port Glasgow had shipping services, Rothesay was the holiday destination for railway workers. All over Scotland you can marvel at the astonishing amounts of money we once had to build incredibly beautiful buildings, and the people now housed in cardboard blocks of flats, who once earned a decent living and spent money, sustaining everybody around them as they did so.
Whilst the porridge wogs are, of course, of no importance to the English and Welsh voters who have now decided to revive the old UK, (they hate everyone with equal venom) they have now noticed similar desertification of their own areas, and they are angry with Westminster. Scottish people are just whingers, of course, but these proud English have expressed their anger by demanding that Britain exit what is seen to be a controlling EU, which somehow manages to induce the Conservative Government that these same people voted for, to create policies which kill the disabled through neglect and welfare punishment, invite an underclass of immigrants to undercut the fake minimum wage, and – shock horror – reduce their local services.
Does anyone seriously think that their favoured Conservative Government is more trustworthy with human rights, the environment, TTIP, TISA, CETA and promoting a healthy economy which benefits everyone within Britain? No, I do not think they do. I think they are more like my neighbour, who does not want Scottish independence in case he has to do some additional paperwork and refuses to understand that people are dying BECAUSE HE VOTED TORY. I think they have, like the young, been trained to hate, and they have chosen the traditional English way out – it is Johnny Foreigner’s fault.
With my economics hat on, I forsee interesting times. I do not forsee a return to ‘Buy British’ or the heyday they seem to think they will return to, but a country that allows you to make a living and allows the fishing boats to fish their own waters would be nice, so it is not the end of the world. The pound going down is not so bad either, since it will create a demand for the goods nobody sees the point in making any more.
It may also interest the disappointed youth to know that nobody was prevented from going on holiday before we joined the EU.