Dear Jim,
May I add my voice to what I
suspect and certainly hope will be the throng of constituents urging you to
oppose whatever legislation the Government might bring forward to further the
country’s departure from the European Union? I am partly inclined to leave it
at that, since you must have heard all the arguments before, yet feel that such
would be an act of laziness, shading into cowardice, so please humour me.
To those who speak
disingenuously of ‘defying the will of the people’, there are so many responses
that it is difficult to know where to start. One might do so by pointing to
those prevented from voting, by age or by nationality. One might also point out
that this is a parliamentary democracy; not only is it impossible for a
referendum to be anything other than advisory, but its advisory nature was
explicitly conceded by the Government. There is also, of course, the little
matter of the Supreme Court judgement. It is, though, simply absurd for anyone
to claim to restore parliamentary sovereignty – not that it ever needed restoring
– by circumventing it. There may very well be good reasons to adopt another
system, but that is an entirely different matter. Moreover, a crude, slender
majority of an electorate, even if it were less gerrymandered than this, has never
been considered to offer a mandate for major constitutional change. In any
case, the will of all, as Rousseau would tell us, is quite different from the
general will.
Perhaps more fundamentally,
still more personally, our future is being stolen from us: stolen by ignorant,
xenophobic, often downright racist people, a great number of them of an age to
suggest that theirs is an existentialistic act of revenge upon generations who
have already been many times cursed by their social vandalism. Most of us have
no hope whatsoever, especially in London, of owning property. Our financial
prospects are bleak, and will be far bleaker in the bargain basement
ultra-neo-liberal order the Conservatives have in mind. We shall never be able
to retire; we fear the loss of our National Health Service; we worry about
being dismissed at will on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, or any other
prejudiced whim. The European Union has often been our only hope against the
ravages of Thatcherism and its successors. It is far from perfect, and is in
great need of reform, but its neo-liberalism is at least considerably removed
from that of the Conservative Party.
We are Europeans. We do not see
free movement as something to be tolerated, still less attacked. It is for us a
blessing to have the right, as European citizens, to live, to work, to study
alongside our European brothers and sisters. For many of us, it is our keenest
of dreams to do so. We likewise welcome those brothers and sisters with open
arms to our shores, and we abhor the vicious, even deadly, attacks upon them by
racists. The people to whom this is happening are not an abstraction. They are
our friends, our neighbours, our lovers; they are those we pass on the street
or sit next to on the Tube; they are our fellow citizens, of Europe and of the
world. We care about them and treat any attack on them as an attack upon
ourselves. We have no wish to compel those who do not wish to make use of their
privileges to live elsewhere to do so; all we ask is that they do not, out of spiteful
malice, prevent us from living our lives.
In an increasingly dangerous
world, with an outright fascist government now ruling the United States, now
more than ever is the time for European solidarity. That need not, should not,
betoken insularity, yet it will enable us to help other countries in greater
need than our own. Cast outside the European Union, we shall matter to no one;
we shall be quite incapable of influencing the EU’s decisions concerning
ourselves and the rest of the world. That is not, as some would have it, to ‘do
Britain down’ – the very phrase, incidentally, displays a chilling indifference
to Ireland – but to attempt to elevate her, so as to play a full role in the
world of today, rather than engaging in repellent imperialist fantasies.
Above all, to oppose this would
be the right thing to do. Our country, our continent, and, closer to home, our
city, our borough, and our constituency depend on it. The alternative is
catastrophe of a kind even the most pessimistic of us have not begun to
imagine.
Please do what you can.
With best wishes,
Mark
