Suzanne Moore writes:
What happens the day after we vote Brexit?
The first year? Anything? Nothing? Will anyone actually notice?
These are the sort of questions I would like answered instead of being bombarded with fantasy scenarios.
George Osborne has said that families will be £4,300 a year worse off if we leave Europe. Will I lose £4,300 from my income then in that first year? That’s a lot of money.
No, I won’t. Nor will you.
This is a figure conjured out of a Treasury report, forecasting a slowing down of the economy by 6% over a very large period of time.
It is designed, as all electioneering now seems to be, to appeal to us purely on base self-interest: “I will vote for something only if there is financial reward in it for me personally.”
The reduction of the EU referendum to facts and figures – and largely figures that are not facts at all, but forecasts made by those who have got it significantly wrong in the past – is but one way this debate is a turn-off.
A turn-off manifests itself in the form of turnout so it matters.
It also reduces every argument about democracy to one about the economy, thus shutting down any space for alternative visions.
Either this is a huge moment for our country, our identity, our place in the world, or it is about which bunch of managers is more efficient.
So we have two elites simply batting imaginary figures at each other over different kinds of meltdown, one financial, the other triggered by migration.
My gut remains Brexit and I am tired of being told that to even consider this is to bring about some kind of apocalypse.
To be anti-EU is not to be anti-Europe or isolationist, it is to ask whether to continue to prop up this anti-democratic institution is really the progressive position.
For all the dark warnings about Brexit unleashing the rise of the far right (hasn’t that already happened?) both sides operate with utopian visions too.
Someone like Yanis Varoufakis, despite having flown too close to the sun, makes the case eloquently.
Only a pan-European anti-austerity movement has any chance of reforming an institution that works largely in favour of the troika.
But there is an equally idealistic vision for Brexit, and that is the possibility of a genuinely new agenda opening up that would be looser and allow more organic forms of co-operation to evolve that are not simply controlled by the demands of “business”.
Between these possible armageddons and utopias, it is still very hard to get a grip on what will actually happen if we leave.
We will still trade, we will still be a big economy, we will still be in Nato.
Our farmers would surely be in big trouble, as our manufacturing industry is already, but we might have to ask who has come to let this happen.
The break-up of the UK may ensue, which seems to me long overdue. Or things may just tick over.
I want to be told more, not just given imaginary sums before I make up my mind.
Right now the inhumane deal the EU just made with Turkey is surely indefensible, as is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership currently being negotiated between the EU and the USA.
Obama will be here soon telling us that we must stay in. As are Peter Mandelson and a half-hearted Jeremy Corbyn, a weakened David Cameron. And some other guys.
Listening to Osborne – architect of ideological austerity, a man who consistently misses his own targets – tell us that Brexit will impoverish us further sends all sorts of alarm signals, surely?
When people say: “Would you really line up with Boris Johnson and the other bunch of weirdo guys?”, all I can say is I don’t fancy yours much either.
These are the sort of questions I would like answered instead of being bombarded with fantasy scenarios.
George Osborne has said that families will be £4,300 a year worse off if we leave Europe. Will I lose £4,300 from my income then in that first year? That’s a lot of money.
No, I won’t. Nor will you.
This is a figure conjured out of a Treasury report, forecasting a slowing down of the economy by 6% over a very large period of time.
It is designed, as all electioneering now seems to be, to appeal to us purely on base self-interest: “I will vote for something only if there is financial reward in it for me personally.”
The reduction of the EU referendum to facts and figures – and largely figures that are not facts at all, but forecasts made by those who have got it significantly wrong in the past – is but one way this debate is a turn-off.
A turn-off manifests itself in the form of turnout so it matters.
It also reduces every argument about democracy to one about the economy, thus shutting down any space for alternative visions.
Either this is a huge moment for our country, our identity, our place in the world, or it is about which bunch of managers is more efficient.
So we have two elites simply batting imaginary figures at each other over different kinds of meltdown, one financial, the other triggered by migration.
My gut remains Brexit and I am tired of being told that to even consider this is to bring about some kind of apocalypse.
To be anti-EU is not to be anti-Europe or isolationist, it is to ask whether to continue to prop up this anti-democratic institution is really the progressive position.
For all the dark warnings about Brexit unleashing the rise of the far right (hasn’t that already happened?) both sides operate with utopian visions too.
Someone like Yanis Varoufakis, despite having flown too close to the sun, makes the case eloquently.
Only a pan-European anti-austerity movement has any chance of reforming an institution that works largely in favour of the troika.
But there is an equally idealistic vision for Brexit, and that is the possibility of a genuinely new agenda opening up that would be looser and allow more organic forms of co-operation to evolve that are not simply controlled by the demands of “business”.
Between these possible armageddons and utopias, it is still very hard to get a grip on what will actually happen if we leave.
We will still trade, we will still be a big economy, we will still be in Nato.
Our farmers would surely be in big trouble, as our manufacturing industry is already, but we might have to ask who has come to let this happen.
The break-up of the UK may ensue, which seems to me long overdue. Or things may just tick over.
I want to be told more, not just given imaginary sums before I make up my mind.
Right now the inhumane deal the EU just made with Turkey is surely indefensible, as is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership currently being negotiated between the EU and the USA.
Obama will be here soon telling us that we must stay in. As are Peter Mandelson and a half-hearted Jeremy Corbyn, a weakened David Cameron. And some other guys.
Listening to Osborne – architect of ideological austerity, a man who consistently misses his own targets – tell us that Brexit will impoverish us further sends all sorts of alarm signals, surely?
When people say: “Would you really line up with Boris Johnson and the other bunch of weirdo guys?”, all I can say is I don’t fancy yours much either.
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