So I was at a restaurant recently with a group of friends. There were twenty of us, including some children. And we had to decide on which main meal to eat. Three voted for steak and two voted for salmon. The rest were updating Facebook on their smartphones. When the steak choice won, the salmon people started throwing food around, saying that three people didn’t adequately represent twenty and, besides, those three were all senile and selfish people who didn’t deserve to live.
Of course I’m drawing a parallel to Brexit. Current logic is that the 52% “Leave” vote only represented a quarter of the entire UK population so, therefore, the “Remain” crowd should hold sway.
I’m not sure where such logic comes from. Could it be from the educational dumbing down we and our children have all been subject to over recent decades? In any case, I began a bit of light digging. In examining recent UK general elections I found that the turnout roughly hovers around the 70% mark. The Brexit referendum had a comparable turnout of 72%, something even Wikipedia admits was:
the highest ever for a UK-wide referendum and the highest for any national vote since the 1992 General Election
So when Greek expat, Alison Cuff, states that:
just 52 per cent of referendum voters were pro-Brexit, less than half the entire electorate and just 25 per cent of Britain’s total population
you can see she’s using that old “lies, damned lies, and statistics” saw. By her logic, every Prime Minister ever elected didn’t deserve the position because s/he didn’t represent the majority of Britain’s total population! Take that, Margaret Thatcher!
Cuff further states that
many long-stay British nationals living in EU member states were disallowed from voting
and this is true. Which begs the question, how many British nationals interested in voting in the referendum lived overseas? This is an elusive figure, one much more difficult to come across than you might think. The Guardian thinks the figure is 4.7 million, but isn’t too sure:
It is hard to get exact figures for how many UK citizens now live overseas – the Home Office report suggests the total is 4.7 million. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office does not have its own figures, and the World Bank quotes from research done in 2007 by Sussex University. The Department of Work and Pensions knows how many people are claiming the UK state pension in each country, but pensioners make up a small fraction of emigrants each year.
And this figure is from 2012. We further need to narrow this down to UK expats living in EU member states so, with nothing more concrete available, let’s use the Guardian figures for their top ten destinations:
Australia 1,062,000 (251,000)
USA 829,000 (140,000)
Spain 808,000 (104,000)
Canada 608,000 (157,000)
Ireland 289,000 (126,000
France 253,000 (57,000)
New Zealand 248,000 (54,000)
South Africa 219,000 (38,000)
Germany 97,000 (39,000)
UAE 65,000 (680)
The European total comes to 1.5 million, but let’s double it to 3.0 million, just for argument’s sake. Of course expats include family members, so let’s assume a family of three, with two British citizen parents. (I think I’m being more than far with this fudging.)The number comes down to 2.0 million. If we take the same turnout outside Britain as we did inside (72%), we come to 1.4 million potential referendum voters. And if we assume, say, 75% of them voted to “Remain” (an optimistic figure for anonymous voting), you’d come to 980,000 people. Considering that the results for Brexit were:
Leave 17,410,742 51.89%
Remain 16,141,241 48.11%
Valid votes 33,551,983 99.92%
Invalid or blank votes 25,359 0.08%
Total votes 33,577,342 100.00%
Registered voters/turnout 46,500,001 72.21%
would 980,000 people have made a difference? No. But with all the howling and gnashing of teeth on display, you wouldn’t know it.
I’ll be honest and say that, if I were a UK citizen, I would have voted to leave. And not because I’m old, senile, racist scum. In fact, the very fact that I am an older person means that I think of the future generation more than my younger colleagues. Let me give you a thought experiment. You are asked to vote on whether automation should take over all house painting in the country. If you’re in your 30s, you probably won’t care. “Yeah sure, why not? Technological progress and all that.” I would have probably said the same thing at that age. But say you’re a grandparent who has employed house painters in the past. What would you say then? Would your age give you a different perspective? Would you think, “Hmmm, I understand the question, but Joe-the-Painter’s son/daughter has a family to feed. They can talk about house painting now, but what’s to stop them widening that to electrical systems and building houses in the future? Where will that put Joe’s children and grandchildren?”
The one big lie that the “Remain” crowd cling to is the labeling of older people as selfish when, in fact, they are being the least selfish. The older you get, the more you think of the future generation. I see that all the time when I talk to my friends. The younger ones concentrate on their mortgages, investments and childcare costs, and the older ones talk about their declining health and the legacy they’re leaving for the younger generations. I doubt I’m in the minority on this impression. So to say that the older people who voted for Brexit are selfish is one of the most disgusting falsehoods I’ve ever heard.
If anyone is selfish, it’s exactly people like Alison Cuff, who see their cushy allowances and free medical care and subsidised this-and-that go up in Brexit smoke. We’re expats ourselves and know of what we speak. Expats get to navigate a system and work out benefits to themselves and that’s fine. But to assume that everything is always going to work out to their/our advantage only smacks of arrogance.
The very definition of “expat” contains impermanence. Such people are only “temporarily” leaving the homeland. If you do it permanently, then you’re a migrant and that’s a different case. Right now, we’re weighing the pros and cons ourselves. Expat or migrant? To continue moving around the world with our children or settle down? To which society do we wish to pledge allegiance? These are weighty questions that should encompass more than reciprocal medical arrangements (as nice as they are), yet that seems to be all that Cuff and her ilk are able to absorb. We’re losing our free healthcare! We’re losing no-questions-asked residency! We’re losing the nice weather and higher wages with no catches! Waaaaaahhhhhh!
Pathetic.
And there’s another reason that I would have voted to leave, and that’s because the entire European Union is a pyrite god on clay feet. It doesn’t deserve to exist. When the EU got into full swing, I thought it was a wonderful thing. I don’t think so any longer. It pains me to say but the Euroskeptics were right all along. What we have now is German conquest and exploitation through economics rather than via the traditional Panzer divisions, and it’s sickening. In a timely op-ed at the New York Times, Alan Johnson outlines the reason why left-wingers were also in the “Leave” camp. In part, Johnson says:
The European Commission is appointed, not elected, and it is proudly unaccountable to any electorate. “We don’t change our position according to elections” was how the commission’s vice president Jyrki Katainen greeted the victory of the anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece in 2015.
The European Parliament is not a real parliament. It is not a legislature; its deputies neither offer manifestoes nor carry out the ideas they propose to voters. Elections in improbably large constituencies, with pitifully low turnouts, change nothing. As a Parliament staff member said at the European Research Seminar at the London School of Economics, “The only people who listen to M.E.P.s are the interpreters,” referring to the members of the Parliament.
The European Council…generally meet[s] just four times a year…[and] are not directly elected by the inhabitants of the nations whose fate they decide.
The wishes of electorates are regularly brushed aside… Ireland, the only state to allow a referendum on the [Lisbon] treaty, voted against it. So Ireland was told to vote again until it got it right. That’s democracy, European Union-style.
But my final thought for today is, what if–despite everything–Cuff is right? What if, given a 100% turnout of the entire British population, most would have voteed to remain? Would that have made any difference at all? You see, maybe Britain (and the financially nefarious City of London) wanted out of the EU because it could see the writing on the wall. Maybe they could see the day when the “glorious” experiment would fail and wanted to be as far away as possible when that happened. So they rigged the vote. To protect themselves against the EU failing. And to protect themselves against the refugee swarms. And blame it all on the pensioners.
Wouldn’t that be the best April Fool’s Day jape of all?
UPDATE: Read “12 people, things that ruined the EU” from Politico magazine for an entertaining, if divisive, view. A taste:
As commissioner for science, research and development, [Edith] Cresson famously paid her dentist to be a scientific adviser. In 1999, allegations of fraud intended to target Cresson ended up bringing down the entire Commission. To put it crudely: Cresson did to the EU what Zeus did to Europa.
although some commenters also score hits:
A german author trying to whitewash how Germany ruined Greece and how Germany created the refugee crisis, and trying to pin the blame on everyone else except Germany.
[A]ll of this just to whitewash Frau Merkel’s responsibility and pin it on Viktor Orban? Glibly done, but no dice.
#11 belongs to Angela Merkel.He almost came close to naming the real culprit (point 9). He just couldn’t do it, because he declared his love for her [Angela Merkel] in his new book.
(Copyright KS Augustin, 2017)
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