As you drive across Southeast England, you don’t even have to talk to anyone to see the depth of anger and division the EU referendum has released. In gardens, by roadsides and on farmland, huge pro-“leave” banners read: “We want our country back”. Britain isn’t usually like this, not even during a general election.
If you spend your time amongst the internationalised metropolitan upper-middle-class, it’s pretty unusual to find anyone who wants to leave – or, for that matter, thinks such action would be anything other than catastrophic. You don’t have to go far outside London, however, to find the opposite is true – one Whitehall official I know was told by an auto shop owner in Kent that he didn’t know anyone who wasn’t voting “leave”.
Much of the campaign coverage has focused on personalities, particularly the looming confrontation between Prime Minister David Cameron and the man who so clearly wants to replace him, former London mayor and “leave” stalwart Boris Johnson. But while personal confrontations have been toxic enough, the approach that both campaigns have taken to the rest of the population has been damaging.
Neither side of the argument, it seems, has been willing to risk even the barest concession that those on the other might have some kind of point. Perhaps worse still, those leading both campaigns appear to have treated the rest of the electorate – both their own supporters, and those opposing them – with little more than contempt. Those on their side, they seem to believe, are only susceptible to the most grossly simplistic – and often crudely scaremongering – messages. While those on the other side, they clearly believe, are barely worth treating as intelligent human beings at all.
Yes, leaving the EU would be a step into the dark. No, there simply isn’t an option to turn back the clock to some imaginary mono-ethnic 1950s Britain in which the messy, multiethnic, multi-polar wider world just goes away. And yes, many of those who want to leave really are uneasy and displaced by the way in which the UK has changed over the last quarter-century.
What both sides seem to have lost sight of, however, is that actually most voters are reasonable, largely admirable people trying to make a tough decision in an imperfect world in which it’s impossible to know the consequences of jumping either way.
Maybe holding the referendum in the first place was a mistake – I strongly suspect David Cameron believes so. Maybe we should just have continued as we were. Maybe these decisions are just too complicated for ordinary people. I don’t buy that, however. I think the British population will make – individually, at least – what they think is the best decision for them, those close to them and the country at large. And then, whatever the answer, we have to make that work.
