The Imp of the Mostly Perverse

OK let me get one thing out of the way at the start: I am one of those awful people who did not vote in the EU Referendum. I was away in Florida on business and I basically lack the organisational skills to figure out whatever it is you have to do to make a postal vote happen. 

Another reason I felt it wisest to spare you my vote was some of the ideas being put forward by my personal Imp of the Mostly Perverse.

You see I am on principle a floating voter. I might be that I nearly always vote for the sensible, good-person choice, but I make it a principle to march into the polling station arm in arm with my IMP and make my choice only when I am right there in the booth.

I’m a firm believer in the principle of the secret ballot but I may as well tell you these choices usually involve some kind of Lib Dem, or an independent where one is available, or people I know and respect as being right for whatever the job is. Sometimes I may even vote for one of the more independent-minded Labour types. At the recent London Mayoral election someone on line had suggested that London was in a Christian country and could not possibly have a Muslim mayor. Being a proud secularist I left the Imp of the Mostly Perverse firmly at home and went straight round there to vote for the only candidate I could sensibly have chosen in the first place (I would have preferred David Lammy, who lost in the Labour primaries; not because I always agree with him but because I felt he was the only candidate with the kind of large personality that London needs; but maybe an unassuming pragmatist is what London needs sometimes).

With the EU Referendum coming up, my political IMP had a couple of interesting ideas that might have swung things to an “Out” vote. Not necessarily in Britain’s interests.

One of the IMP’s ideas is one I’ve been sounding off about for a long time, which is that by joining the EU, Britain effectively turned its back on a whole community of nations with which it shares not only a language but also the full range of educational and professional qualifications, the Commonwealth. Why should Kenyan tea or New Zealand butter or Zimbabwean beef have to go through all the same EU trade hurdles as any other country in the world, in order to access UK markets? Those arguments about the curvature of EU bananas were not as trivial as they sound, since a strange number of EU territories are somewhere in the tropics but are also pieces of France by means of some little understood geographical alchemy. So the rules favour French bananas over those of Britain’s neglected Commonwealth friends and relations.

Why for that matter, should it be easier for Romanian or a Lithuanian nurse to work here, than a Zimbabwean or a Ghanaian? I'd happily see both, but surely the folks who come from our world are an easier fit for many roles? 

It has always been my belief that easier movement of both trade and people with the exciting and fast-growing nations of the Commonwealth would be to everyone’s benefit. Trade would aid the growth of many of those countries far more effectively than aid does.

I grew up in one of those countries myself, Zimbabwe – and with British parents I am not untypical of the mix of people and cultures that comes out of that world. When I came to this country as an adult in 1981 I found the British attitude to us small-minded and dismissive. In Zimbabwe the sense which many of us had was that a colony becoming independent was kind of like a child growing up and leaving home (I daresay this view was not shared by all of my countryfolk but it was there). The British attitude, at least from those few English people I met when I first arrived in London, was that if those countries did not “want” Britain any more then good riddance to them.

I do not know if British attitudes have improved since then, though I suspect they have. Nor was it clear that this Brexit referendum was the time to unpack something I had long considered to be a lost cause, a historical mistake and nothing more. 

Interestingly, there were vox pops on the news articulating this viewpoint, and it may have accounted for the close result in Birmingham – but there was no-one in the political campaigning who took ownership of this idea. If there was, this would have immediately repudiated the notion that to vote for Brexit you had to be a racist, since this approach would tip the balance away from seeing more immigrants of European ethnicity, and towards those who have shared in some part of our proudly long and diverse history but only a few of whom are ethnically European.

Were the British now big enough to take ownership of a new, positive relationship with the Commonwealth by now? I didn’t know. Who was I to tell the British who they are?

While this first of the Imp’s ideas has Britain’s interests at heart, the second was rather more brutal. I’ve seen how Europe works as a great, vibrant, interconnected thing. I can see that it needs to be more integrated to reach its full potential - it was clear from the outset that you can’t have one currency without a more formally federal kind of government and more centralised monetary policy. Other recent challenges faced by the EU have served to reinforce this point. 

It is equally clear that Britain a a whole cannot and will not ever be part of such a unified project. In terms of whatever is that elusive something that holds Europe together, Britain is about as European as the Valles Marineris.

So one thing I would seriously have to think about as the pencil hovered over the ballot sheet was, is Britain’s continued presence in the EU something that will make it easier or harder to move the European project forward? As someone who wants Europe to succeed, my IMP would be asking which option is best?

As it turns out, the deal that Cameron worked out in the run-up to the referendum was one which would allow Europe to pursue greater integration without Britain standing in the way. An option, incidentally, which expired the moment the Referendum vote was known – so those who are pushing for a reversal or a re-match, are missing the fact that any future British membership of the EU would not be on the special, one-off basis that Britain had always had and was set to continue with.

So that would have taken care of this one of the IMP’s ideas – but again why was this not part of anyone’s political campaign? There must be many voters who would want to be reassured about what would make for a strong Europe as a trading partner on our borders.

As with the Commonwealth so with Europe: what if anything is Britain’s vision for it and its place in relation to it? And who am I to tell the British who they are?

So I basically recused myself on the basis that I was curious to see who the British thought they were, and in order to make sure that my Imp of the Mostly Perverse was safely out of harm’s way in the swamps of Florida when the time came.

This was all on the back of a kind of complacency that in the end, the British would vote for whatever they were least happy with so they could carry on grumbling about it.

I was wrong as well as unkind in thinking this.

I also failed to spot that, as someone who is sort of half from somewhere else, I am basically your typical Londoner and had every right to vote for my own interests and my own vision of things, whether people out there in the Shires shared those views or not. I passed up on the opportunity to be me, someone who has shared in the life of these islands for longer than a lot of their people have been alive.

There was a third possible and non-racist reason that some would consider a Leave vote, but it is one that is too politically sophisticated for my IMP. This is the notion that the European project is somehow bound up with and coextensive with the prevailing and frankly unwise political consensus about how economies should be run, a neo-liberal something which started with Thatcher and Reagan (neither of them continental Europeans I notice), and that voting “Out” would somehow help bring this economic misadventure to an end. I’m all for smashing up that thing – or at any rate prodding it firmly and repeatedly with very sharp things until we can have an economy which benefits people rather than corporations and elites. I just don’t know if this is the event that would bring that about. 

So in spite of the ugliness that it became and the things that have been believed and heard and said since the result, not all reasons to vote “Out” were intended to be racist, nor were all of them ignorant or short sighted.

Now it seems my Imp of the Mostly Perverse has cast its vote in my absence, and we are in the still not quite believable position where the United Kingdom has (as a whole but not in all of its parts) voted to simply up and float away from the European Union relationship that it had. 

There is a common theme that underlies the two reasons that my political IMP might have voted Leave. This is the notion that in most situations, people should follow their heart even when their head seems to be saying something different, because then whatever you do will be done from a place where you believe in it.

Yes, it was nice that we had so many good things from the European Union, but deep down, did we really deserve those things if the UK’s heart was not really in the European project? We may lose nice things for a while – maybe even a generation – but in the longer run if the country is acting in line with its own convictions, this should find us in a better place than when we were constantly grumbling about, and holding back, the thing we were noncommittally part of. I believe, admittedly on very little real evidence, that it is better to be whole-heartedly who we are, than half-heartedly who we are not.

If you can’t be true to yourself, no-one else is going to do it. Sometimes you don’t know where that is leading you, but I have always lived by that notion in my personal life and I’m secretly pleased to see that the UK has had the courage to do exactly that, unknowns and financial turmoil and all. I just wish there was not the undercurrent of xenophobia and racism that has come to accompany this thing. Mainly though, I suspect those events are a form of political looting brought about by the power vacuum that followed the result, a sort of opportunistic bout of self-expression by unpleasant forces that we always knew were there but usually kept in their box. I don’t think they speak for any of the reasons that a country should either throw its soul into the European project, or realise that it never will, and leave it to those who are able to do so. Those who are able to do so may well include several parts of what is now (and ideally could somehow remain) pieces of the United Kingdom as well.  

Now it is up to the United Kingdom, right across England and Wales, London and Scotland and Northern Ireland and somehow Gibraltar, to come up with a common notion of who we are. Maybe there will be more than one such notion and more than one set of futures, or maybe there is still something we can all find that we share, even wandering Londoner types like me. 

Maybe if we follow our hearts as a group of whatever we are, there will be options we had not yet thought of. Options that will allow us to reach a potential that is best for each little piece of this Untidy Kingdom, for all of it, for Europe and for our friends across the Commonwealth and the wider world. For the first time, we are in a position to find out. 

St Petersburg, Florida

26 June 2016