Revoke Article 50 – Whichever Way You Sway We Need A Fair Vote!

I’ve never made any bones about the fact I voted to remain during the referendum in the summer of 2016. I was voting, like everyone else, with very little understanding of what would happen if we were to leave the European Union and I based my decision largely on the fact that I didn’t feel equipped to decide anything else. I saw many good things for our country as being members of the E.U not least freedom of movement between countries with fair taxation on travel, peaceful relationships and a single market cutting costs on import taxes. I mean that’s really just scraping the surface of incentives I see to us being stronger together and the waffle and promises of a greener grass just didn’t quite wash for me.

I saw why it was luring to step over to the other side of the fence but promises from a government who were already fractured did not give me confidence and my gut told me, because it had to be on gut without hard evidence, that it would be the wrong decision to jump ship.

I can understand why people did though. Some people, some with a vested interest for their own personal lives and some voting for the country as a whole,  which is how I believe we should vote all of the time, voted to leave the E.U based on what we now know was false information given to us by a government they trusted under illusion. They chose the way they did because they saw great benefit to themselves and our country based on misjudged trust and we were promised lots of things from lots of people. None of whom had any more of an idea than we did.

Though we weren’t really fed that information either.

David Cameron didn’t want it he said yet he set it up – he set us up – and then he pissed off to Cornwall to go surfing with his family like he does every year. I saw him there in the summer a year after the referendum. He was on Polzeath Beach surrounded by the protection minders that we, as a country, still pay for. He was having a right old British jolly time with his family on the sand, in and out of the surf looking like he’d not a care in the world. My step mum wouldn’t let my Dad, a staunchly left wing man in his politics, say anything to Mr Cameron on account of the fact she said he was on holiday and deserved to be left alone. I didn’t agree it has to be said. The man was on holiday sure but with how much tax paying money making it possible for his safety? With my money right there beside him, holding his hand, protecting him from anyone invading his space, I’d have said he was fair game for comment. And my Dad would have been perfectly placed to sock it to him. A Doctor of philosophy he’s better educated than Cameron and an eloquent speaker, honest and loyal -again they’re very different, I think he’d have been the very best person to have politely and intelligently told David that we were firmly giving him a middle finger for all of his Brexit culpability!

Now my Dad, despite owning a hugely successful business, which gave him far greater personal gain to be had as a Tory, could never, stoop so low as to vote for them. Like me he believes in a fair country with fair ground and opportunity for all. I am extremely proud of him for his left wing views and would have applauded him for invading the space of the man who set us up on the road to nowhere.

Alas my Dad knew which side his Cornish cream tea was buttered and we didn’t upset my Step Mum (who shares the same politics as us but is maybe a nicer person) and instead we silently seethed at Cameron while I pretended to take pictures of my burgeoning baby bump and secretly got him in the background of my Instagram stories. Well… You can take the blogger out of her natural habitat but she’s still gotta story man…

So you can see. I’m a lefty. I’m a remainer. But I’m also pro democracy and this is why I think we need to revoke Article 50 and have a second referendum.

‘If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy’ – David Davis, Twitter, 2016

We none of us were told the truth. Whichever way we floated and settled. We were all lied to by a crumbling government who have barely managed to keep it together throughout this whole process. We now know a lot more factual facts as opposed to made up ones and it’s fair to say that a high percentage of people who made the choice to vote leave, on the information they had been given at the time of the first referendum, would like to change their vote. I think it’s pretty black and white and plain to understand that this is not about defeating democracy but about obtaining fair votes and without that, can we even fight against a second referendum calling a loss of democracy as a card?! 

I could tell you fact after fact about the promises and then back them up with truth.

Promise: A £50mil saving to our NHS.

Truth: 98% of all medication used in this country is from other countries within the European Union and once we leave it will be subject to massive import taxes leaving our £50mil on the floor.

I could ask you questions like ‘How will the independent florist manage to import her flowers with inflated taxes?’

I could tell you that agriculture, engineering, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, education, beauty, food, supermarkets… ALL industries will be massively affected in a negative financial way be they small independent people or big outfits.

I could ask you to guess who, after all of this, will survive and I reckon we could take a pretty good stab.

But I won’t. Well, not any further than I have, because there’s not much point really. I think we have all had enough time to make up our minds be they well informed choices or bad. And we have all had the opportunity now to make our decisions based on more than ‘Come on sovereign, we can be Tom and Barbara, let’s go self sufficient’ – back then T & B, we assumed, lived in Surbiton in a lush pad big enough for cattle. They didn’t tell us that actually it was a high rise one bed flat in Croydon and there were 5 children’s mouths to feed on top.

And whichever way Tom and Barbara live, self sufficient or not, they still have to visit the Doctor sometimes. He’s Spanish by the way and diagnosed Tom with prostate cancer last year. Without his Doctor’s expertise Tom might have had a later diagnosis and that could have been disastrous. He was cared for in hospital by a plethora of nursing staff mainly from other European countries, wasn’t he lucky!

But look, I digress, what I’m really trying to say here is this:

You didn’t have a fair vote if you voted to leave.

You didn’t have a fair vote if you voted to stay.

Everyone wants a fair democratic vote.

We did not have that!

Would you expect a teenager sitting an important exam to live the rest of their lives based on its results if they went into that exam blind? If they hadn’t done any studying for it whatsoever because they didn’t realise they had to? The the only little bit of information they had on the matter was given to them five minutes before they went in by their tutor, a woman they trusted because she was in authority, but she didn’t know anything about the subject either and had just battled through making up as much plausible content as she could because she simply needed to get them through the door of the examination room?

No.

Of course not. That would be utterly ridiculous!

Sign the petition here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/241584