G.K. Chesterton once said, “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land”. Your author the British citizen says tonight that after being surprised to the core by a UK referendum result that he did not expect in the slightest and having stated with utter confidence that Remain would win for many weeks:
1) I was wrong
2) I’ve been away from the UK a long time.
As for a personal preference call on what’s just happened, rather than my incorrect call on what I expected the UK as a country would do today, here’s what was in last Sunday’s edition of The IKN Weekly on that subject:
Just
this Sunday morning I’ve been asked by mail for a personal call on
Brexit, what I would like instead of what I believe will happen. While it’s all
in my head here’s your post-script. At first I was pro-Remain out of political
instinct more than anything else, then as the campaign unfolded and the Remain
strategy of fear-mongering and dragging the debate down was rolled out I questioned
that position and, somewhat to my own surprise after thinking things though
more carefully, found I really didn’t care which way The UK votes. In the great
scheme of things it doesn’t really matter much, it’s not fit to tie the
shoelaces of Bastille Day, Pearl Harbor, August 6th 1945 or
September 11th 2001. So for many weeks up until last Thursday I was
a complete agnostic, but then this (1) event Thursday morning (not the terrible
one of Thursday midday) changed my mind again and I saw that if I favoured Leave
I would be lining up behind and empowering an overt racist in Nigel Farage and
all who sail with him. Therefore my vote is an anti-vote, it’s to Remain in The
EU because if not the ugliest side wins and my stars, they had to get pretty
ugly to out-do the awful Remain people. If it weren’t for the rise of the far-right
racism now driving Leave, I honestly wouldn’t give a damn who wins.
There’s a lot of post-mortem talk today about the working class protest vote being the driving force of the Brexit result but let’s be clear, plain straight racist propaganda helped tip the balance too. So even though it’s now a foreign land to me there’s no reason to return; why immerse yourself in ugly?