THE LAST time I was tempted not to exercise my right of suffrage was at the Westminster election of 2005. The betrayal by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson was almost complete and many of us had been left to feel foolish and naïve for ever thinking that these people were ever serious about bringing about a fairer Britain. It had simply been about the exercise of power amidst the dawning realisation that our Iron Chancellor had expended more energy in trying to defenestrate Blair than he had in trying to unstitch Thatcherism.
I opted for one of the socialist fringe parties in the end while wondering how we had arrived at a place where support for Clause Four was now considered extremist and where a vote for a real left wing party was now deserving of the same look a trainee trapeze artist might expect to get from his new fiancee’s dad.
But how do you approach a referendum where both sides are united in their desire to maintain the fiction of a democratic and fair Britain? On one side we have Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. I don’t happen to believe that any of these men are racist or xenophobic. You have to be possessed of a scarecrow’s brains to be genuinely racist and none of these men could ever be accused of stupidity. Instead they stand accused of something worse; of using fear and suspicion of others to exploit the resentment of working-class people who have seen their jobs and communities disappear. The two Tories don’t believe any of the stuff they spout about mass immigration and patriotism: this is just a power-grab intended to finish off a lame duck prime minister.
If it wasn’t for Farage, Johnson and Gove, and all the talk of taking our country back from Onion Johnny and the 90 million Turks who are about to invade us I’d be tempted to file into the Leave lobby, I really would. For whatever ideals the European Union once had it departed from a long time ago. Its thousands of hugely-recompensed fluffers and panderers may boast that its founding aim of bringing an end to war among its nation states has been a success but that’s simplistic mince.
They’ve just swapped one type of war with another. Tanks, guns and bombs have been replaced by loans, bonuses and profits to enslave the poor of Europe. Just ask Greece and Spain. Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank waged a war on those peoples that was no less terrible and unjust than if they’d rolled into their towns and cities at the head of a column of tanks.
In order to preserve its hallowed market economy, the countries of the EU enslave the developing world by insisting on repayment of loans given to former military governments and then supplying arms to competing rebel factions that inevitably emerge after they’ve been overthrown. God forbid that the African economy should ever be allowed to develop and emerge to compete with the economy of the West.
And when the Mad Max thugs of Daesh come into town pretending to be devout followers of The Prophet they find, to their delight, that we’ve created a captive audience for them.
Meanwhile, we’ll keep corrupt Asian princes in their palaces and indulge them in their favourite pastime of decapitating young women just so long as they keep rolling out the barrels and giving our party donors their cut. And we’ll turn London into a Paradise theme park for these desert gangsters and their Mafiosi cousins in Moscow.
So don’t kid yourself sunshine, that a vote to Remain tomorrow is about preserving peace, jobs and the hard-won rights of the workers. It’s about preserving the markets all right; but only in such a way that they continue to ensure that capitalism goes unchecked and that the greed of Europe’s richest and most powerful companies will never be threatened by rights to employment, a proper living wage, an affordable home and protection from being ripped off by the energy cartels.
And don’t give me either any lofty rhetoric about this being a chance to take back our country from nasty people; our country? On the eve of this EU referendum millions of children in the member states of “the most successful economic union the world has ever known” will go hungry tonight or huddle underneath bridges for shelter.
Many of them are in the United Kingdom, a country where tax avoidance by our largest firms is routine and where the democratically-elected government of a civilised electorate punishes the most vulnerable people in society for the corrupt practices of the financial sector whom they reward with tax breaks and get-out-of-jail-free cards.
There certainly are nasty people in this country and a disproportionate many of them are to be found in positions of power and influence on either side of the EU debate and in all Westminster parties. They are kept there and funded by those to whom they award tax breaks; peerages and knighthoods.
In return there is unlimited access to the people we delude ourselves into thinking are there to serve us. If you think the outcome of tomorrow’s referendum will alter this then you are deluding yourself. Only one future referendum matters and that’s the next one on Scottish independence. Only in that one will we have a chance to leave all of this. The people who want our vote tomorrow were the same ones who bullied Scots into thinking they had no stake in the currency of the UK; that pensions would be protected; that jobs would be safe in our last remaining steel yards and shipyards and that underneath the broad shoulders of the UK we were all in it together. Aye right.
Poena cullei was a method devised by the ancient Romans of dealing with those found guilty of parricide. This involved being sewn up in a hessian sack with a viper, a dog, a rooster and a monkey and being thrown into the River Tiber. You could say that they were all in it together too.
Yet, I’ll probably vote to Remain because, well… you have to vote. And being in a sack with a snake, a dog and a monkey is still preferable to Farage, Gove and Johnson.
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