Vote Remain (16/06/16)
Matthew Parris writing in The Spectator urges people to keep their eye on the ball, stay calm and vote Remain in next week's EU referendum.
Good advice, if you ask me.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/the-six-best-reasons-to-vote-in/
Six reasons to keep calm and vote Remain
By Matthew Parris - The Spectator
Like almost everyone, I’ve piled angrily into this fight. But as the debate nears resolution I feel ashamed of all my furious certainties. In the end, none of us knows, and we shouldn’t pretend to. So I’ll try now to express more temperately six thoughts that persist as the early rage subsides.
From the first three you’ll see that I’m beginning to understand that for many the EU is now a whipping boy. ‘Europe’ has become for many what in other ages Rome, or communist plots, or America, or international Jewry, or big business represented: a conspiracy against us, an explanation. In the words of Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, ‘a kind of solution’. Europe has become a punchbag for our fears and frustrations. Hating the EU has become exciting, brave, a source of self-affirmation, a proxy.
1.A proxy, first, for our dislike of being told by government what to do. Think how the European Union, ‘Brussels’, ‘faceless bureaucrats’, and that generalised vision of insolent officialdom that enrages every Briton, is being made an easy stand-in for everything we hate about government, all government.
