The UK goes to the polls tomorrow to decide
if we want to remain in the EU or leave, I’ve lived in and outside the EU and I
know where I'd rather be.
Living outside the EU meant I've dealt with a
multitude of pointless border checks, unnecessary suspicion, baggage searches,
bribery and corruption not to mention expensive visa’s and intransigent
bureaucracy.
When I think of the EU I tend think of a
wonderful wider European continent and not abroad but as an extension of where
I was born, so it’ll come as no surprise then if I say I’m not entirely stoked
by the idea leaving.
Building barriers, walls or deeper moats goes
against my sense of problem solving, we don't need to build the wall higher, we
need to solve the root cause of the problem if indeed there is one. If history has taught us anything it’s
nothing ever good comes from a wall.
I want my children to grow up in a
multi-cultural society and to have a multi-cultural perspective, I want them to
be bi-lingual or tri-lingual, enjoy tapas, bratwurst and smoked carp, have
international friends and partners, know how to cook a globe artichoke, to
study at one of the universities dotted throughout Europe, get a job in one
country after another, travel and work freely across an expanding European
Union and not sit at home, blinkered, blaming anything they consider to be
different for all the problems in their world.
The more we are exposed to a new things the
sooner it becomes accepted and not different, like garlic, remember when garlic
was an exotic thing?
It makes little difference to me if
legislation is delivered from Brussels or Whitehall, most of us are about as
detached from the process of running a country as is practicably possible. We all like to say how we’d run the country
safe in the knowledge that we don’t and there will never be any consequences to
our ideas however sound or crack pot they may be because we are not running the
country.
It’s the same way we like to be armchair
football managers and proclaim how a diamond or 4,4,2 would resolve the
perpetual problem on the left but we’ll never know because we are not actually
football managers.
The EU is not evil, it’s not full of people
trying to think up new ways to specifically target Britain with burdensome
bureaucracy, it has achieved a lot of good and will continue to do so with or
without Britland.
It is, however, a bit of a basket case and
long overdue an overhaul, reboot or reset, but surely it’s better to be in
inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent.
It's probably too late in the day to ask not
what the EU can do for me, but what can I do for the EU, but it's possibly the
question we should have been asking all along.
Vive la Europe.