Dear Mum
I have spent too long trying to understand your decision. It is time to break the radio silence.
When you voted OUT what did you think would happen? I wonder what wrongs you thought would be
corrected. What benefits did you think
would accrue from this act of defiance?
Did you think that we would wake up on June 24th to a new dawn? Or did you have a sudden realisation that
there was no plan and this could start going horribly wrong?
You live in a beautiful city with two Universities. With your splendid university education
behind you, rich with the input from many European teachers, and your two
degrees did you not think about the negative impacts on our higher education
system? Did you not know about the
Erasmus student exchange schemes or the European Commission grants driving
research? Did you not think about the many
Europeans turning down job offers now because they no longer feel welcome?
Just what were you thinking of? Did you not think of the prospect of an
independent Scotland and your grandson's future? Is a new passport a fair exchange for all
those English tuition fees he has had to borrow? Do you think he will want to come back to
England now?
Is immigration really such a problem for you? Where will you find your next Polish cleaner? Do you really begrudge them a place
here? When I woke up from my operation,
the one that saved my life, the anaesthetist was Spanish and the consultant was
German. The intensive care nurse was
Portuguese. Do you really want to throw
these highly skilled and dedicated people out of the country? Does it worry you so much that we need them to
staff the NHS, an institution that has looked after you almost all of your
life? Do you think that the NHS is
safer now that the country has voted, by a narrow margin, to leave? And what did you think of the £350M
promise? Were you really taken in by
that? Did you see how quickly it was
retracted after the result was announced?
Did you not think about the pension and healthcare
arrangements of the 1.5 M British expats or did you swallow the line in the
British press? If you looked at the
headlines you would be forgiven for thinking that this was only about inward
migration from the EU. Did you not
realise that this is a two-way street?
I really fail to see how you think that you have got your
country back. I can't see the benefits:
- the loss of business confidence, major corporations threatening to leave, the
jitters in the City, a downgrading by Standard and Poor, all of which will
diminish further the pension pots of millions of pensioners. Were you really convinced by the angry and
threatening words of both campaigns? I could see this coming: the wagging finger
from Obama and the famous last words of Osborne were the turning points. Did you not feel belittled and insulted by
their words? So why did you not think
this through?
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