I Agree with Nick!
Nick Clegg is being hailed as 'Mystic Clegg' for his amazingly prescient comments on what a vote for Brexit might bring.
"A naïve and dangerous fantasy" sums up what the former Lib Dem leader had to say at a pro-EU rally in Edinburgh before polling day and all I would like to add is:
I agree with Nick!
Jo Cox is actually an old friend of mine and she’s an absolutely lovely lovely woman and an outstanding politician. I just hope we don’t have to hear the worst. My thoughts are with her and her family. and her team in her constituency.
I’m going to deliver the prose after the beautiful poetry we’e heard about the decision we face next Thursday.
Given that this is a European Movement event, I suspect most of the people in this room will be persuaded that we should remain. I want to address my remarks to those who aren’t absolutely convinced that we should stay or absolutely convinced that we should quit but those many many fellow citizens who might be wavering or tempted to vote for Brexit but could possibly be persuaded to vote for Remain next Thursday
I would ask them and all of you, how it would feel if you should wake up on Friday morning and the UK has voted to quit the EU of which it has been a strong and powerful member for 41 years.
Imagine again how would you feel not if you were like us, those who would feel heartbroken, at that decision taken contrary to our wishes but if you were one of those who voted for Brexit because you have been promised this land of milk and honey, you have been promised this utopia who have been promised that all of their troubles and frustrations, all the anger that people legitimately feel about the status quo would evaporate with the morning mist in the sun the moment they put the cross next to the Brexit choice
How would they feel when they find out that the people who promised all this don’t know what happens next. They might be united in their furious loathing of the EU, but they have absolutely no idea what happens next.
Do we become like Albania, Canada, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland? We still don’t know.
How can it be that a week before we make this momentous decision the people who ware asking us to leap off the edge of a cliff don’t even tell us if there’s a parachute to allow us to land at the bottom at the other end. It’s astonishing. That’s the first thing people will realise – that they have put their faith have put our trust in people who have no idea what to do next.
Look to Westminster for the Govt for leadership for some sense of purpose. What happens next? What they will find there is a Conservative Party imploding. As Nicola has rightly said one bunch of right wing Tories replaced by an even more extreme bunch of right wing Tories. There will be a bloodbath in the party of government and Westminster will be pitched into years and years and years of constitutional gridlock.
They talked quite recently about how they’ll get it all done and dusted in 4 years. No they won’t.
You can’t extricate yourself from a club which is in the very fabric of so much that we do of which we’ve been a member for 4 decades in a few short years and then effortlessly negotiate a trade deal where apparently having said bye bye we don’t want to abide by the responsibilities of being a part of the EU, the rest of the EU is not going to turn round and say “Have your cake and eat it.” Of course they are not going to do that.
Never mind the 50 other trade deals we would need to renegotiate of which we would suddenly no longer be a part
I am one of the few people in British politics who used to negotiate those deals. We don’t have any international trade negotiations left in the UK because the lead has been taken in the EU over the past 40 years.
So, imagine not only the political chaos, the directonlessness of the Brexit leadership and a political establishment in London embarked in bloodletting and constitutional gridlock.
Imagine the economics. I spent 5 as it turned out wholly thankless years trying to play my role in delivering what needs to be essential if you want your economy to recover from a trauma. Without political stability it is very very difficult to pick yourself up from the floor.
It terrifies me that these reckless irresponsible elitists in the Brexit camp want to drag us back into the furnace of economic recession
It’s not their jobs that are at stake, it’s not their livelhihoolds are at stake it’s not their welfare that’s at stake, it’s millions of ordinary citizens who will suffer. That is what will happen economically. The writing is on the wall. We are an open economy.
We depend massively on the kindness and generosity of strangers to invest massively in our economy
The pound will fall, prices will rise. I personally think that far from Project Fear such as it’s called overstating what will happen, I think they are understating it cos my experiences in economics is once you get a downward spiral it feeds off itself. The idea that such an open economy so integrated into the world’s largest borderless marketplace could somehow endure nothing more than a mild recession for a couple of years and then everything would be fine, I think is a fantasy.
It is a naive and dangerous fantasy
On immigration, the people who might vote for Brexit they will have seen today that repressible poster from Nigel Farage with a photograph of these desperate wretched vulnerable people fleeing conflict in Syria Iraq & Afghanistan. He’s using that on a poster! How dare he?
But even on his own terms, does anyone seriously think that these people are going to stop moving in large numbers across the European continent just because the UK has pulled out of the EU. What a despicable lie. How dare you claim to people that immigration if that is what people are concerned about will suddenly disappear, that this mass movement of people will suddenly stop just because the UK is not in the EU. It is a fantasty, it is a mendacious fantasy and it is appalling that they keep peddling it as hard as they do.
That is not to mention the at first imperceptible but over time very significant and unavoidable slide of our country’s relevance in the affairs of the world? There will be a slide in relevance in the status of our country in the world. How can we stand tall in Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow Washington if we can’t stand tall in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. If we can’t stand tall and lead in our own neighbourhood how can we stand tall in the world?
What really concerns me is that these people who might be lulled into thinking that this false utopia that the Brexiteers are promising might come to pass. There isn’t a land of milk and honey, there isn’t a promised land where all our problems will disappear if we leave the EU next Friday. No there isn’t.
What there is is political upheaval, constitutional gridlock, economic decline, international irrelevance. That’s not what I want, that’s not what we want. We don’t want that for our kids our our grandkids either.
