Letters: Brexit regret isn’t as common as Jonathan Freedland suggests, says Marcia MacLeod, while John Dunn proposes a pro-Europe party, … Read More
Letters: Brexit regret isn’t as common as Jonathan Freedland suggests, says Marcia MacLeod, while John Dunn proposes a pro-Europe party, … Read More
“My reasoning is that you cannot have 27 countries – all with different histories, cultures, industries, societies – agreeing on everything. Therefore no country actually gets what it wants, or what is best for it.” …..
Well, I do hope that Marcia of London always gets what she wants – and that she never becomes my neighbour. Her “thinking” is so wrong on so many levels … but here are just two:
a) It demonstrates just what unpleasant thinking lies at the heart of the Leave case and why it has been the brainchild of the ultra-right wing … the defenders of the “Sovereign Individual” in the words of Rees-Mogg’s father with its commitment to “social darwinism” … the survival of the fittest and devil take the hindmost. “I want what I can get, what is best for me – never mind anyone else”. Who wants neighbours like that, eh?!
b) Marcia of London then transposes this onto some supposed “unity” of a nation state, as though everyone in Britain wanted the same thing. Does a baker in Birmingham really want the same things as a banker in Belgravia, a baronet in Bournemouth or a booze-addict in Brighton? And is it not quite possible that the Birmingham baker has more in common, in fact, with a baker in Bonn or Brussels? That ordinary people might find solidarity beyond language and cultural barriers is, of course, a threat to a governing “class” and its acolytes, with pretensions to entitlement.
The European Union is the unique, first-ever tentative step towards an “Enlightenment” world order of cooperation – it is a profoundly precious (and given that it breaks all the traditional moulds) a potentially fragile thing. The Enlightenment scrapped witch-hunts, replaced superstition by science, trial by ordeal or combat by evidence-based justice, abolished slavery and refined the concept of universal respect for others. Of course, membership of the EU is economically advantageous – it gives us the economies of scale, self-sufficiency and potential independence enjoyed by the US, the former Soviet Block and China. But more importantly, it is an attempt, for the first time, at a new, visionary world order, based not on the endless conflicts that have dogged human happiness from the beginning of time, but based on co-operation, democracy and, above all, a respect for persons, both its own citizens and others. It is a fragile hope for humanity that is being threatened by self-centred proto- and neo-nazism (= Nationalist Socialism, which instantiates Marcia of London’s error and is now called ‘Popularism’) in a number of EU countries – with Brexit – to our eternal shame – leading the way.
All on the basis of a referendum that would not have been considered democratic in any of Britain’s major political parties or any of its sports and social clubs and that was allowed to overturn Wilson’s ratification referendum which DID meet normal democratic criteria. Fortunately, with a glimmer of hope for our exoneration in the history books and in spite of the myth, Brexit was NEVER supported by a “democratic majority” of the British people.