Wanting to leave the EU is not an ‘extreme’ idea

On its front page yesterday, a Sunday newspaper promised inside “John Major: The Middle Ground Is Empty”. In my edition at least, the headline proved all too correct because, when I turned to its middle ground, I could find nothing by Sir John at all. I think I can guess what he was saying, though.

Michael Heseltine had better luck. His words appeared in the same paper. He declared that he is going to vote for the Liberal Democrats at this week’s European elections. He will do this, he says, because his own Conservative Party has been “infected by the virus of extremism”.

It is an article of faith with Tory grandees that their support for Remain is a moderate position and therefore Leave supporters must be extreme. I think their attitude may explain why their cause isn’t doing so well these days. In the 2016 referendum, 17.4 million voted Leave and 16.1 million people voted Remain. These were, respectively, the largest and the third largest votes ever cast for anything in the entire history of the United Kingdom. It is therefore highly unlikely that either side is, on average, extreme.

The core message of Leave is that we should be free to govern

ourselves. The core message of Remain is that we are better off in a wider union of fellow Europeans. Both are decent, defensible positions.

Among these enormous numbers there are, of course, some extremists. Some Leavers see the EU as a totalitarian conspiracy. Some Remainers think that Britain would be better off run by officials in Brussels without any democracy at all. But neither of these factions remotely represents the main body of opinion to which each attaches itself.

So when Lord Heseltine and Sir John lay a unique claim to the middle ground, they inadvertently insult millions of people. Leave and Remain can be equally moderate positions. If the Tory Party were led by Brexiteers, it would be no more extreme than it is currently when led by someone who does not know what she thinks: it would simply win a lot more votes.

If we are to use this word “extreme” so freely, we could ask Lord Heseltine and Sir John – politely, of course – whether it might not itself be rather extreme to write off the decision of more than half the participating electorate (and about 70 per cent of their own party) and tell them they cannot have what they voted for.

It is a well-known feature of life as a journalist that if you write for 30 years on a very big subject, such as the global economy, you may well receive almost no letters or emails from readers, whereas if you raise a small matter, you will be inundated.

The rule was fulfilled last week, after I wrote about hospital car parks. The paper received what used to be called “a bulging postbag”. Feelings run high, and some experiences are strikingly awful. One poor correspondent described suffering a heart attack under the strain of trying to extract a car park ticket.

A couple of further points emerge from the correspondence. One is that free parking is not the solution. This is because: a) parking is a cost to the organisation that provides it, and it is not unreasonable for the hospital to try to recover that cost so it has more money to spend on treatment; b) if parking were free, numerous motorists in overcrowded towns with expensive parking (ie, most towns) would use it, thus hogging the places; c) free parking would mean that hospitals had no incentive to provide enough space.

The problem with parking charges is their inflexibility, the clunky or broken systems of payment, and sometimes the extortionate amount – not the principle.

The other is a point of comparison. Nowadays, most hospitals outsource their coffee shops. If you go into a hospital, you notice that people at the desk purporting to help you rarely look up when you approach and often do not know which bit of the hospital is where and other essential information. The coffee-shop people, on the other hand, are generally cheerful and efficient, and seem to want your custom. In a bad hospital, the coffee shop sometimes seems the most humane place in the entire building.

Why, then, is an outsourced coffee shop usually perfectly good and an outsourced car park usually perfectly bad? I suspect it must be because you do not have to buy coffee but you do, if you come by car, have to buy a parking ticket. Perhaps the solution is to have two car parks in each hospital, run by rival firms. Then they would have to compete on price, efficiency and basic humanity.

Trying to show it is busy, the House of Lords nowadays sends out countless press releases. A high proportion is about Brexit, and 100 per cent of the Lords’ press releases on the subject are against it. “Hassle-free EU driving at risk, Lords warn”; “Does Brexit risk more plant and animal disease?” etc.

One of the few other subjects with which the noble House seems to be preoccupied is “intergenerational fairness”, on which it has a select committee. So far as I can ascertain, only one member of this committee is under 60 years old. The mean average age of members of the House of Lords is 69. It must be the least intergenerational legislature in the world.

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