Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser
Sleepwalking into victory for Brexit Dear Editor
Apart from jobs, human rights, workers’ rights, equal pay, paid holidays, maternity leave, consumer and environmental protection and the working-time directive, what has the European Union ever done for us?
The EU isn’t perfect – far from it – but it has brought peace and stability in Europe since the end of World War II.
The EU was founded to “make war unthinkable and materially impossible”. This it has done for a historically unprecedented 70 years. Short-sighted politicians forget that at our peril.
Like the NHS and the BBC, it is easy to take the EU for granted but we’d miss it if it was gone.
Better a bureaucratic talking shop than another battlefield.
If Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump ever got their way the EU would collapse and there would be war in Europe again within a generation.
Along with seven Tories, the only Labour MSP who supports Brexit is none other than Elaine Smith, which is odd when she represents one of the most deprived parts of western Europe which, after decades of Labour and Tory neglect, has benefited from more than £40 million in EU regeneration grants during her time in office.
Scotland, a net beneficiary of the EU, has received £340 million for apprenticeships and skills from the European Social Fund in the past decade alone.
Yet Ms Smith wants us to remain in the UK but not the EU. Whether she realises it or not, she wants Scotland to be under perpetual unelected Tory rule at the mercy of Tories even worse than the current lot.
This referendum isn’t about Europe. It’s about who leads the Tory party: Boris or Dave.
We have been reluctantly dragged into a Tory civil war fuelled by the rise of UKIP, which has hee-haw to do with us.
It’s a poisonous campaign characterised by rabid hysteria on both sides which insults the voters’ intelligence.
A childish shouting match, each side of this debate is as bad as the other, both deliberately misleading the public with their patently absurd claims and counterclaims.
No wonder voters are switching off.
Most normal people don’t really care about Europe one way or the other and, with only right-wing Europhobic obsessives guaranteed to vote, we could be sleepwalking towards Brexit through understandable apathy and indifference.
Christopher Smith, Airdrie