Why I’m voting In for the EU... and Out for all of these futile referendums

IF WE vote to leave the EU, Europe could be plunged into war, pensions will be stopped and we will lose the NHS, we are told. If we vote to stay we will be engulfed by a tidal wave of Turks, Brussels will take over our lives and we will lose the NHS, others say.

What a festival of democracy this referendum is. Of course, it is the same as any other referendum. People never vote on the real issue. Pumped up politicians panic and champion hyperbole. And the vote itself solves nothing.

Think about the ‘festival of democracy’ Alex Salmond put us through in 2014. The promised second oil boom. The currency union we were assured of, which he now admits would never have happened.

And the whopper which got him up to 45 per cent – the idea that a No vote would lead to the Tories privatising the NHS.

How’s that going? The Tories – evil as we are lazily expected to think of them to be for fear of losing our Scottish mojo – aren’t privatising the NHS anywhere, let alone here. And never could have.

But that was the big stinking lie which got the ‘positive case’ for independence up to a respectable stuffing in the referendum.

It would seem that threatening the health service is the only way politicians on all sides can think of scaring us into voting for them.

The current argument about Europe seems to have taken the worst lessons of Scotland’s vote and doubled them.

I heard Salmond debating Iain Duncan Smith on the issue on the radio. It was like listening to two bald men fighting over Alex’s combover.

People plead they want more information. Let’s examine that plea.

It is really the public saying they want to be told by someone convincing how to vote without having to think about it.

People love the idea of democracy but they don’t really want choice. They want certainty. They crave trust. It is why we call the vacuum cleaner the hoover, no matter what make we have bought.

Which is why referendums are so dangerous, pointless but also the politician’s mechanism of choice in an age of uncertainty.

The last decade saw trust fade in almost every institution we once believed in.

Remember when someone used to make a promise to you and add, ‘you can take that to the bank’? Well, no one trusts the banks any more after they plunged us into a financial crisis which has seen a generation’s hopes stall, if not disappear. Then we had the expenses scandal where we learned that for decades our politicians had actively deceived us to get more of our money for their own ends.

Season that particular pie with the fact we found out that national treasures such as Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall were actually child abusers and that a cardinal who condemned homosexuality was gay and you sense the national palate.

No one is to be trusted.

Adrift

The vast majority of the public don’t want to think about politics. What we really want is our leaders to be like good football referees. They manage things so efficiently you don’t notice them because the game – or our life – is so good. Right now we are far from there. In 2011 we were asked to vote on a referendum on changing the voting system. It was a reform that neither those in favour or against believed in but it was part of the Tory/Lib Dem coalition fix. Politicians offered the public an answer to a question the people weren’t asking.

They chose instead to deliver a damning verdict on Nick Clegg.

So in ten days we are all being asked to make a decision which most of the population doesn’t understand but which our political leaders have abdicated to us. The reason they have done so is simple. Just as the current Jeremy Corbyn-loving membership of the Labour Party are divorced from people who might actually vote Labour, so too is the Conservative membership adrift from the public.

But David Cameron had to promise a referendum to please his party. He doesn’t believe in it. It is a vote where he has everything to lose and nothing to gain. A vote to leave will see him exit Downing Street. A vote to remain will not have lanced the European boil in the Tory Party, it will have cultivated it into a tumour.

I will vote to remain not because I fear another war or losing my pension.

It will be because I believe, as I did in 2014 and still do, that countries working together benefits us all.

But like the Scottish referendum, others will vote for different reasons. There is no rational case for Scotland to leave the UK, but there is an emotional one.

Salmond tried to frame the referendum question not as ‘what is best for Scotland’ but ‘are you Scottish or are you not? Are you patriotic or are you not?’.

Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers are trying to do it the same way on the EU.

Devolution of power to the smaller nations of the United Kingdom has made many in its largest one – England – desperate to assert their identity. They have every right to do so. I would be as proud to be English as I am to be Scottish.

My fear for this referendum is that, just as many Scots did in 2014, they assert Englishness in a way that damages England and the UK by voting to leave the EU.

As a Tory MP put it to me, as he swithered on the EU question, it really comes down to this: Would you rather have unlimited immigration from Europe or recession?

Neither side will put that uncomfortable truth bluntly, but they are blundering about trying to press the right prejudice gland to win our votes.

Whatever the result on June 24, the issue will not be settled. Nicola Sturgeon has assured us that what was a ‘once in a generation’ moment in 2014 will be repeated in quick time if there are six months of opinion polls suggesting she could win a re-run. The same will happen with Europe. However the Tory Party’s self-inflicted wounds seep or fester, no one on either side will accept the result, whatever it is.

Just as if we had voted Yes in 2014, if the UK votes to leave the EU the years of negotiating a settlement will leave plenty of time for recrimination and the call for a new vote.

Referendums unleash on us the fervour of the fanatic. Rational argument is parked rather than prized. As many people vote out of prejudice as principle. That is why if I was asked whether we should have another referendum I would vote ‘No’.

No, until we have a political class we can believe in and who can be seen to be arguing from genuine principle not prejudice.