We always welcome a Letter to the Editor to share with our readers – unsurprisingly they don’t always reflect the views of this publication. If you have something you’d like to share, get in touch and of course, your considered comments are welcome below. This from Joseph Kohlmaier. Ed
All I have heard from the Leave supporters on Facebook, in comments, or on blogs, Websites, at the end of articles, with very few exceptions, can be summed up with ‘grow up, you lost’ or ‘yeah, if England loses can we replay the game?’.
Where, before the referendum and now, are the arguments? I mean serious arguments, not emotional rhetoric about ‘taking control’.
This isn’t a football game, where we get to have a go again, and then back to real life via the pub and Burger King.
Misleading campaign by people with no plans
We’re not bad losers. We’re just not going to watch the country completely do itself over because of an electorate that doesn’t have the competence to make the decision it was asked to make (which is why we have a government, with all its flaws but also restrictions and traditions), or because of a referendum that is not legally binding, and a misleading campaign by people with no plans.
This isn’t an election. And if it were, it would channel a fairly abstract cloud of policies into a solid arena of discussion and checks.
Direct democracy?
I side with the argument that the current state of affairs is not enough to change the legal status of a whole population. It simply isn’t enough, taking everything into account.
No institution in the Western world is governed directly by its members, except maybe Switzerland, a country with a small population and a political culture set up to support a different kind of democratic process.
Not families, not schools, not companies, not the United Kingdom. The bigger an institution gets, the more obvious it becomes why this is. Yes, this causes privilege. But it also makes life and culture possible. Peace depends on it.
Nothing to lose?
I think this needs to teach the people who govern our country a lesson to be a bit more careful with the spirits they are calling in the future.
People who voted leave did so because they think they had nothing to lose.
It’s not ‘all about immigration’
It is the government’s responsibility that people should feel that way. And don’t say ‘it’s easy from where you are standing, because for you immigration is not a problem’: some areas with the highest immigration numbers in this country voted IN, not out.
I wish everyone would stop that mantra of ‘it’s all about immigration’.
It simply isn’t.
