About Brexit - A Voter's Dilemma 2

A couple of months ago I wrote to my MP expressing some of the concerns outlined in my post,  About Brexit - A Voter's Dilemma.

Here is an extract:

'I want to be spoken to by politicians who respect me to the extent of thinking I might understand rational argument.

I don't want to be subjected to snake oil salesmanship designed to win me over by trickery rather than by convincing me by rationality and evidence.

My aversion to snake oil, and my wish to be spoken to by people who respect my ability to understand rational argument, are especially relevant to Brexit. Even my conservative thinking, Brexit voting, working class drinking mates in the [pub] are no longer so sure of themselves: 'We weren't given enough information', and 'All we got was remoaners versus £Zillion NHS promises on buses' are verbatim quotes from two of them.

I don't want an electoral choice which asks me to choose between racists – islamaphobe or antisemite.

There's a whole bunch of us out here who understand the simple logic of the idea that we can condemn some of Israel's behaviour without having to rewrite history and become holocaust deniers and anti-semites.

At the same time I do not want a party who are cowed by zealots who scream racist every time someone raises a concern about immigration.

(Gordon Brown – 'Bigotgate'?)

I don't want the condescension which leads posh politicians to make clumsy attempts to drink beer or eat pies (past Labour leaders), or to make feeble Bernard Manning type jokes (BoJo) - in a cringe-making effort to get down with the man in the pub.

And speaking of this demographic, I want a party that recognises that the working class are no longer wearing clogs and flat caps and working in mills, and that they are mostly not employed in strategically powerful union-represented industries. And that, unlike other deserving groups in society, who are recognised and represented, they get very little recognition except, perhaps, in the form of blame.

I am fed up with issues being presented as two part oppositions – Doom versus Paradise.

There may have been validity in this when the Left had a huge homogeneous core of big industry clock punchers all in search of a better sort of state. But now it is insulting. We are more or less 50:50 for and against Brexit for instance. So is half the populace stupid? If we leave the EU or not, a large number of people will be very unhappy – and their concerns should be treated with respect and not with derision.

Another destructive consequence of such false opposition is that it creates an illusion that Goodies are totally good and Baddies are totally bad. In the case of the EU I fear that a second referendum, if it were to happen and if it came out in favour of Remain, would be taken as a seal of approval for the EU as it is. But I think there is much wrong with it. It's just that I think recent events are a wake-up call and we should be working to change it from within. Similarly, I think there's a lot wrong with the NHS - but I certainly don't want to lose it and would be happy to pay more in tax for it. So as well as supporting it I want it to be looked at critically.

In short, I want grown-up political parties that treat me as a grown-up, tell me what they want to achieve and why, and which do a bit of fact-checking before offering what they want me to think is evidence. Parties that are not spooked by tunnel visioned zealots or that mistake the one liners of Twitter for anything other than the modern version of poison pen letters.

As someone who works with people from many countries I desperately want the bunch of gurning caricatures currently humiliating my country in the eyes of the world to be replaced by grownups.'

I hope to expand on some of these points in further posts.