Don't Pee Your Pants
David Aaronovitch has some sound advice for voters in the great EU referendum via his regular column in The Times.
'Don't pee your pants' - because the instant sense of relief soon wears off!
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/leave-campaigners-sound-a-lot-like-enoch-vskc29vz2
Leave campaigners sound a lot like Enoch
By David Aaronovitch- The Times
The immigration rhetoric has been dangerous and polarising, while the sovereignty argument is as weak as it was in ’75
‘It’s like when a child desperately wants to pee in his pants and does it,” said Nicola Clase, Sweden’s ambassador to Britain, when I asked how she viewed Brexit. “At first there’s a feeling of relief and for a few moments it’s nice and warm. Then he’s just cold and wet.” And the problem with the referendum, I added, is that while we might otherwise indulge the child’s enthusiasm, we’re all forced to share the same knickers.
I was once a would-be wetter. The last time we had a referendum on Europe, four decades ago, I marched through the streets of Manchester as a student communist calling for an Out vote. The Common Market, the party told its members, was a capitalist club aimed against Soviet Russia and the “socialist countries”. After the demonstration we went to picket Enoch Powell who, awkwardly, was speaking in the city on our side. Then, as now, the anti-Europe brigade was a strange alliance and had the referendum been four or five years later the party might well have changed its mind. I certainly would have — as much instinctively as intellectually.
The best of today’s Leave campaigners argue close to the line that Powell took in 1975. Lacking only his nostalgia for Empire, they believe two important interconnected things: that national sovereignty would be enhanced by a withdrawal and that democracy would be strengthened.
I do them the credit of believing in their integrity, even if many of them seem incapable of returning the favour. One of the remarkable features of this campaign has been the capacity of intelligent men and women to dismiss the arguments of people such as the president of the United States, the governor of the Bank of England, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Archbishop of Canterbury as somehow the product of impertinent self-interest. Had God appeared to us in a meteor shower and endorsed the EU, Michael Gove would have told us that the British people were tired of deities.
