TELEGRAPH VIEW
22 June 2016 • 11:57am
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| We are not "quitters", Prime Minister |
As the Prime Minister has said, the result will affect the children and grandchildren of those going to the polls. He implied that this meant anyone who cared about their family should vote to stay. Leavers, he suggested, were placing their kith and kin in jeopardy and their country in peril. They were, by definition, quitters.
Since it was Mr Cameron who offered a referendum in which Leave is one of two options, it is unwarranted for him now to stand outside No 10 Downing Street and treat many of those who put him there with such disdain. Many of these “quitters” were instrumental in securing the Tories a parliamentary majority for the first time since 1992. Now they are being told that the great national debate about Britain’s place in the world in which they were invited to participate was really a Hobson’s Choice.
Unlike the Prime Minister, the Baby Boomer generation who disagree with him took part in the 1975 referendum, Then in their late teens and early twenties, they voted Yes to remain by a large margin. The final result was 2:1 in favour of staying in what was then called the Common Market.
These voters, unlike their children, have had 40 years to question whether they made the right decision. What they endorsed in 1975 has changed beyond all recognition, growing from nine countries to 28 and morphing from an economic community into a political union.
It is possible that the voters now being told they are putting the futures of their grandchildren on the line have changed their minds for a very good reason: they have seen how the promises made then were either fallacious or never fulfilled.
It is possible that the voters now being told they are putting the futures of their grandchildren on the line have changed their minds for a very good reason: they have seen how the promises made then were either fallacious or never fulfilled.
They have witnessed at first-hand how, whenever the British government has tried to resist the gradual ratcheting up of the EU’s centralising ambitions, they have gone ahead regardless.
These people are not “quitters”; they were asked by Mr Cameron to reach a judgment and have decided that on the experience of the past 40 years Britain would be better off out. After all, what the Prime Minister called “the hopes and dreams of their children” were their hopes and dreams once. But in the words of a rock band at its zenith when the last referendum was staged, they won’t get fooled again.
Not content with telling Leavers that they would impoverish their grandchildren, the Remain camp also accused them of risking an economic meltdown by the weekend. George Soros, the financier whose speculation against sterling in 1992 propelled the pound out of the European Exchange Rate mechanism, warned of a crisis in the markets. The man who brought us Black Wednesday was now anticipating Black Friday.
Leave aside the fact that dropping out of the ERM was the best thing that happened to the British economy in the 1990s, the Remainers seem to be trying to talk up the circumstances in which a crash could happen. Again, since the Government offered us this referendum, it must have taken into account that Brexit was a possibility.
Were it to happen, therefore, it is the job of Ministers – their duty, even – to ensure that stability is maintained in the markets and not to deploy the sort of rhetoric that fuels uncertainty and feeds panic. In particular, it is the task of Mark Carney, the Bank of England Governor, to react to whatever decision the British people reach. Yet he has risked compromising his independence by effectively joining the Remain side of the argument.
Today will see the final frenetic flourishes in a campaign that has failed to rise to the heights it could have achieved. The Leave side has become bogged down in a sometimes tawdry argument about immigration that has resolved little while the Remain camp has abandoned any pretense that Mr Cameron obtained the reformed Europe he sought.
It has relied on threats and fear, perpetuating a scare story that will inevitably have have had an impact on voters concerned for their livelihoods and those of their families. Yet despite that, or possibly because of it, the final polls indicate that the referendum is still too close to call. History beckons - but which way?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/06/22/older-voters-are-not-quitters-and-they-do-not-need-lectures-from/
