So, Brits who want to leave the EU are over 50 and remember the days before the EU. Brits who want to stay in the EU are millennials, as in, in their 20s or early 30s. All they have ever known is life controlled by the EU.
One of the things millennials really like is the idea of a much larger roaming ground to explore in an uninhibited fashion for work or for play. They can pop over to France, to Germany, to Spain and it’s no different to popping over the border from England to Wales. The older generations tended not to move around as much when they were younger.
The older generations remember a ‘glorious’ time pre-EU. Pre-Common Market, in fact, when Britain was a strong economic force around the world. A time when we produced stuff for the majority of the world. A time largely forgotten, or remembered with rose-tinted spectacles.
The only members of the older generation that want to remain within the EU tend to be the socialists and trade unionists. Obscurely and unfathomably, whilst wanting to remain as part of the EU, these folk will have a tendency to want to devolve from the UK, especially if they are in Scotland or in Wales.
I say ‘unfathomably’ because it makes no sense to want to be free from one strata of control but not another. Surely being free from all ‘masters’ is what the lust for freedom should be about.
Indeed, they want to be free of the elected UK government, but not free of the non-elected EU government. They will wax lyrical about detesting having the UK parliament passing laws that affect them, yet say nothing when the EU does it. I can only assume these folk are a bit confused, because their logic is nonsense, since we all know that the suffocating regulations, directives, decisions, recommendations and opinions from the EU are increasing in frequency and quantity year on year.
Eventually there will be very little left for any of the member countries to self-legislate about. Indeed, a country’s government will soon have little to no function. So, for example, if Scotland were to ‘leave’ the UK, apply to and join the EU, it would only be a matter of decades before their Scottish parliament served no purpose. Likewise for the UK parliament, regardless of the separation of Scotland (or Wales or Northern Ireland) from the UK parliament.
You’d think that those areas wanting to self-govern would want to actually self-govern, not be shackled to government from the EU.
For me, as a kinda libertarian, that’s somebody who wants less government, less red tape, less interference in our lives, I don’t get how people can accept the additional layers of power and control over them that keep being implemented. Indeed, in Liverpool, we suddenly had a Mayor imposed upon us. We never got asked if we actually wanted one, just told we would have one, and asked to pick which person we wanted.
The imposition of a mayor in Liverpool is exactly the same as the imposition of law making from Brussels. Nobody asked us about that either.
This just keeps happening. And it has to stop. This is why I find myself leaning to wanting to be free from the EU. I want us to be more in control of our own destiny.
England's England 