I personally voted to leave the EU… However… (and I do encourage you all to keep reading)… My reasons for wanting to leave were (in the grand scheme of things) so personally, empirically and intellectually limited at the time; founded principally (and in all honesty, solely) in being wholly adverse to the idea of both monopolistic centralised banking, and commensurate forms of monopolistic centralised government, which in my view (and tens of millions of others around the world, including innumerable academics from within the realms of politics, economics, sociology), represented an immutable march towards a very real and very sinister level of overarching world governance.
Beyond that, however. I will hold my hands up and say I was totally uninformed. I consider myself, an intelligent, well read chap ( my academic background is aerospace and astronautical engineering, so the first certainly holds true! )… but nevertheless… did I know everything I needed to know in order to make a truly informed and considered decision?… Fuck… No. Absolutely, bloody not. More than anything else… I went with my gut. My, very, uninformed… fuelled by confirmation bias and echo chambers… gut.
And I would challenge each and every one of us (on all sides of the political divide) and call (most of us) outright liars… to hold our hands up, in total, unabashed honesty, (shaking off the proverbial “shields of invisibility” that are our computer screens/tablets/mobiles, that render all of us so confident and free from scrutiny) and say that we were informed, we “did our research” (god… I fucking hate that phrase…everyone… everybloodyone on the other side of the computer screen “has done their research”)… … and that your decision was so empirically and academically sound and rigorously considered that you knew EXACTLY, what you were voting for.
Now… here’s the kicker… after two and half/three odd years… whilst the process will have engendered within many of us, a much greater sense of things, a much greater level of clarity, resolve and with a little to a substantial amount of more information ‘upstairs’ to boot…
I would argue that most of us (by dint of us just having to live our lives on a day to day basis)… still aren’t anywhere (not even remotely close) to having an all encompassing, requisite level of knowledge to make what any academic would tell you is a “justifiably considered”, decision.
I will be voting Labour. I will happily, happily, accept the outcome of the referendum (even though my ‘gut’, at the moment, is still telling me that leaving is the best idea), mainly because I think the concept of “save yourself first, then when you’ve got it right, save the world” is immutably sound.
But… Should, (and I am praying… I… am… praying) Jeremy and Labour get in… (Because the thought of that mendacious, sexist, homophobic, racist, xenophobic, anachronistic, positively dinosaurian, silver spooned, Oxford University, product of elitist nepotism and nothing else… incoherent (verbose, yes), but total, blustering, blunderbuss-esque, buffoon of a Bullingdon thunderc**t getting back into power is so purely, unabashedly, viscerally, anathema to me…. there are no words… (save for the previous 48).
Sorry… I blacked out for a second there…
But… Should, Jeremy and Labour get in… it is our duty to become as utterly informed as we can be, about everything in this regard and everything that has happened up until this point. You won’t need to pass a degree in the subject… just simply to be able to hold sincere, informed and considered conversations with people in person…(and if they say something you don’t know, go and read up about it)… Instead of throwing terse, captious jabs, retorts, regurgitating soundbites and uploading “shit pictures” for the sake of scoring points (in your own head and nowhere else)… of course the 34 likes, 6 hearts and 1 angry face will say different… but you’ll get Ms Katherine Philpott from Stoke with the other 12 “anti-whatever she believes in” photos that you’ve got saved on your computer, later right?
We’re all human, we’re all British, we all care about our country, we all have families, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, colleagues that we love… We all hate to see unjust suffering, despair, misery and destitution… And we’re all (in one way or another), disgusted by what has happened to our country over the last 10/20 years. So let’s move past this vitriolic, captious, disparaging, irreverent and implacable ocean of angry and laughing emoticons, “Do some serious research”… (fuck)… and get this right!
Kind regards – A Brit.
( A half English, half Mauritian Brit )
( A half Anglo Saxon/Viking, half Portuguese, Dutch, French, Malagasy, African, Indian… Brit)
Reshad Nawoor
