I’ve tried to avoid blogging about Brexit for some time now but one of the reasons for creating my blog in the first place was to express views that I feel don’t get properly covered in other outlets. First of all Brexiter is the term I prefer to use and not Brexiteer, as there’s nothing adventurous  or gallant about the sort of people that have led the UK down this frankly quite tragic road.

Now there are a number of categories of Brexiter in my opinion. You have the ones who just don’t like other people or anything foreign if it’s not a curry or a Saturday night kebab, and they blame the EU for too many Arab or Asian looking people in the country, which just demonstrates their “logic”, if that word can even be applied here. And for people like that there’s really not much that can be done for them except to wait, really. You then have those who were indifferent either way and were only swung by some quite persuasive arguments like extra money for the NHS being splashed on the side of a bus, but have now realised that it was only possible to contribute £350m a week (less rebate) because of the size of the economy, thanks to the immense contribution that immigrants were making in the first place. After a lot of them leave, which they will, the economy will shrink and there won’t be £350m a week to do anything with let alone give to the NHS. But many of this category of people are often humble enough to see the error they have made and are either open to a second referendum with more facts now available for all to see or are too religious when it comes to democracy and believe rightly or wrongly it should be carried out regardless of how much poorer the country is going to be. Finally you have those who should know better but are sticking to their stance, mainly from a sense of superiority that they feel they have. These are the people I really want to focus on.

Now that the dust has settled and we have a much better idea of what Brexit really means, how can anybody stick to the same stance after knowing more? I really don’t get it. Well I do get it, actually and it’s just telling of a certain kind of individual who is impervious and simply revels in the idea of being a disrupter, and ultimately would much rather die first than admit they made a huge mistake. There is something about the English psyche I have to say that is generally absent in Scotland and Ireland. What I refer to here is an ability to view the world in more than simply financial terms. I have to say at this juncture that in order to make the point it is necessary to make generalisations, but obviously not everyone in the three main countries in the UK display the exact characteristics I’m about to describe.

I’ve been to Ireland and Scotland and something I can say from my personal experience and observation is that there is a genuine sense of brotherly love from those two places that you just don’t experience in England in the same way. They even have popular friendship poems in Scotland and Ireland that give a glimpse into the soul and mentality of the people of those countries. This kind of difference in psychology is what in my view explains why some people see things purely from a financial approach in England, and can’t seem to understand how others put people first. This I believe is why Scotland and Ireland voted to remain in the EU because it’s in their DNA. They get it.

The EU project to me is kind of like Bitcoin at the moment – you either get it or you don’t, and the number of people who don’t get it are still quite significant for now. Therefore it will be a younger generation of people that will have to unpick this sad circumstance. I suppose this is always the way when progress is being made, be it technological or social.

I will try my best to articulate the concept of the EU as best as I can. Putting the politics and the imaginary lines aside it is a concept that recognises the equality of all human beings. An acknowledgement that human beings should have the right on this planet to go wherever they want, whenever they want and fall in love with whomever they want, without being restricted by imaginary lines created by people who by today’s standard would have had a similar level of education to a 13 year old.

When the Article 50 letter was delivered to Donald Tusk he actually shed a tear. Not because he was sad that he would be losing the financial contribution that the UK makes to the EU I don’t think, but because I believe he felt a deep sense of sadness and pity for the regressive step the UK was making and how much we will be set back as a people. That’s why the EU’s first priority was to secure the rights of its citizens in the UK, the Irish border issue and the divorce bill. But our Leave leaders couldn’t understand this and wanted to go straight into negotiating trade, but the EU said No, we care more about human beings than money. The EU is a long term project, while Brexit is a short-term lash out over the frustration at the poor governance in the UK, with people not realising that the main problem has always been poor internal governance.

The strategic idea behind the EU is one of human cooperation and mutual respect, which should ultimately lead to a better and more peaceful world for everyone, no matter who or where you come from. I recall people saying how horrible it would be if Turkey was allowed into the EU and holding that up as a reason to leave it. First of all what is wrong with Turkey joining the EU? Some people make the point that it’s a mainly Muslim country and many debate moderators don’t seem to have the ware withal to pull them up on it. I guess they may already have an unconscious bias and see such arguments as valid. That is not a valid argument to me at all; it is just a demonstration of that lack of respect Brexiters have that progressive people struggle to get their heads around. If you see people as your equals, their religion for one should have no bearing on whether or not they are eligible to join the EU club. Other people talk about the strength of their economy; well Turkey has a stronger economy than several current EU countries and is ranked as having the 17th largest GDP in the world according to both the World Bank and IMF (2015 data). So when you strip all the arguments out with evidence, all you have left in the end is xenophobia. Besides, we only get to understand one another better when we mingle with each other and whatever “unwestern” sensibilities there are in Turkey will be diluted and the West will also enrich themselves with some Persian traditions. Feuding kingdoms of old married their children off to one another for the sake of peace so why are we afraid of it now?

I hear people that have never invented or created anything in their lives talking about “We invented this” or “We invented that” so we don’t need “them”. I can’t imagine Sir Isaac Newton being closed minded and not wanting to cooperate and compare notes with the best minds on the continent if he had the opportunity to. In fact I can see him biting the arm off anyone giving him the opportunity to expand his illumination into science and the world at large. Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s father was French but we so vehemently claim him as British, but can we imagine him not wanting to easily cooperate with other engineers around the continent to pick their brains on how they develop and build their own transport innovations? Even Tim Burners-Lee who invented the internet is horrified that the UK is leaving the EU, because he sees the bigger picture and the internet is all about bringing people together, which is the opposite of what the UK is doing with Brexit. Yes you could find the odd inventor like James Dyson with a contrary view, but he seems to be the only one wheeled out every time for the Brexit side. Virtually everyone else is on the Remain side of the argument. Kind of like climate change scientists.

One thing that cannot be put on a graph or a PowerPoint presentation is people’s emotions; their feelings and their perceptions of a country. The coalition of the willing found this out after they made a presentation basically saying they would be in Iraq on Monday, get Saddam out by Wednesday and have democracy up and running by the weekend. Being in Iraq over a decade later with so many lives lost wasn’t on the graph when that presentation was made.  It took Germany many, many years indeed to undo the damage the Second World War did to their image and the bitterness still lingers on in some quarters. The damage that the UK is inflicting on itself in terms of perception will be very long lasting and most people don’t realise or appreciate it now. We will only see this in years to come when we are pleading for people to come to the UK to prop up the economy again. It’s not nice when you are looked upon as a country that appears mean spirited because it’s not all about money for everyone. It’s about being treated decently and with respect and as the human race becomes more enlightened the notion of people coming to the UK just for money is a diminishing one. When people think of Canada at the moment, positive emotions tend to be exuded and for good reason too.

What Brexiters don’t get is that the paradigm is shifting quite significantly and the younger generation in particular see the world much differently from the older generation. National flags don’t carry the same kind of significance that it does to the older generation. They have a lot more respect for their fellow human beings and they just want to live in peace and be free to go wherever they want, whenever they want. The older generation tend to wrap themselves around a flag and continually stir up in themselves that primordial urge to defend a territory. Imagine 20,000 people today using crude implements to hack down people for crossing into their territory; it just sounds so stupid, but that is the modern equivalent of Brexit.

Ultimately, there is a far more philosophical point that many Brexiters seem to miss completely. They seem to behave as though they will live forever. When you look at life from a narrow and short-sighted perspective, you tend to lack the imagination that you could ever find yourself in a situation that we tend to mainly see happening to people in other countries. It cannot be denied that some people have been financially worse off over the years as certain industries have dwindled and they blame the EU for the downward change in their circumstance. But the world is changing constantly and it is imperative that we change along with it. If we keep yearning to go back to the 60s and 50s, we must also consider what that means. It means having spam for breakfast, it means minorities being openly abused and assaulted, it means women’s buttocks being smacked in the work place as a matter of course when all they want is to go to work and earn a living like everyone else without being assaulted. Is this really what we want to go back to? Well I want to go back to the good ol’ days when it was just Wessex. It was so good before Mercia, Sussex and Northumbria joined us and I preferred the old lambskin passport we used to have then. You could have had your head off for the most trivial of things, but the scenery was more bucolic and you knew where you stood with other people. Damn that Athelstan!

More and more people today are getting “woke” and political lines are not what they used to be anymore. Brexit is a backward step that I believe will be put right, but after a lot of unnecessary pain. Brexit is a mark of a false sense of superiority. Globalisation and the internet are levelling the playing field and when it levels up, which it will, where will the UK be then? The EU would have set the UK up perfectly to thrive in that world, but we will now struggle for a long time as that levelling happens. Brexit is a statement of a lack of respect for others, subconsciously and to a degree consciously as well in some cases. Brexit is an exposure of the poor governance, which has also shown a huge lack of civic knowledge in the country of how things actually work, when you even have politicians talking ignorantly of things that are just not possible and people cheering in agreement.

But those who get the concept I’m talking about will get it and those who don’t, won’t until such time that they do, if they ever do. The world is changing constantly and we should be going forward and not keep looking backward. It’s all about international commerce now and those political imaginary lines are disappearing. Today individuals can be paid money from someone in another country thanks to the internet and platforms like Ebay. Jobs for life where you work in a company for 40 years and retire will soon be a thing of the past, and those who want to go back to that will be left behind and their numbers won’t be enough to make a difference at the ballot box anymore. Knowledge and enlightenment is no longer the preserve of a few, but is now a human right and the more people around the world are enlightened, the weaker those political structures we have always known will become and the closer we will be as a human race, making the spasm that is Brexit a futile rejection of progress. Progress that will deliver a better future for ALL.