First up, I obvs have a day job which involves trying to stop people from getting screwed over by bad bosses. So if I have to declare a personal interest in the outcome, it’s that leaving and letting this lot go through our employment rights with a big red pen would mean a LOT of grief for me (if only a fraction of the grief for those people who end up losing the right to refuse excessive hours, or with fewer safety protections).
But main reasons the referendum touches on my life, and the main reasons I’ll vote, are to do with my family.
I was lucky enough to study and work in Germany. It was a great time and a fantastic opportunity. I want my kids to have that. One will make a natural scientist or engineer – how cool would it be for him to be able to study somewhere like CERN, coming from a country still stuck properly into the biggest science collaboration in the world? One would be a great coder, and I want London still to be a tech leader when he comes out of school, a place that attracts the best from the continent to build a world leading sector, and offers our people the best opportunities.
Okay, to be fair, my third son would probably want to be a reality TV star, and we’ll still have those even after Brexit.
But as the most prominent of the Leave side’s handful of economists, Patrick Minford, seems happy to jettison our manufacturing industry, and the way they trot out people like Zero Hours king Tim Martin of Wetherspoons to represent them on industry, it looks increasingly as though a Brexit economy would be a diverse mix of hedge funders, freed from the EU’s responsible finance regs, and nearly everyone else serving them coffee on “flexible” contracts.
They are taking the most colossal risk with our kids’ futures, and they’re doing it so they can “take back control” from unelected bureaucrats.
Okay, EU decision making is crap in many ways, but I have no interest in taking back control to then give it to a Tory government hardly anyone voted for, thanks to our bobbins electoral system, with an unelected second house (providing unelected minsters in government too). Yes, the EU has an unelected executive. Have you noticed our own civil service and spadocracy anybody?
Most of what I dislike about Britain is to do with Tories, not the EU:
TTIP – Tories
Ideological inaction on steel – Tories
Bosses undercutting with migrant workers – Tories
Overstretched schools and housing – Tories
NHS in crisis – Tories
All Brexit does is turn the Tories up to 11.
Remain has been dubbed “project fear”. Frankly I’m engaged in a one man “project shitting myself”.
Vote Remain. Pretty please.