Dear Liberal Lefty Friends,
I will not be voting in the forthcoming Leave/Remain UK Referendum.
I have thought long & hard about this.
I am pro-choice (in politics and beyond), and I do not see any preferable option in this 'election'.
It would seem we are being offered the shit end of the stick, or an even shittier end of the stick.
I understand that many of you have already decided to Remain, and I respect your decision.
I worry that the way we lead our lives these days, you may've got caught up in a bubble of confirmation-bias, but I fully understand that you see this as a good guy/bad guy skirmish, played out on a battleground of misinformation, xenophobia and latent racism.
If there had been any more choices, I would've considered them all equally.
But may I remind you that regardless of what happens on June 23rd, we will still be governed by a Tory administration thereafter.
It may be Tory Right, under a new leader full of gusto & jingoism.
It may continue to be Tory Lite under a grinning Dave and his Macbeth-in-waiting 'Lord' Chancellor Gidiot.
We, the people of the UK, will have done their marketing for them.
A new, new-ish or newer direction will follow.
Despite being democratically elected, they have washed their hands of decision-making in this instance, and gone to the people over which direction their party should take.
They had to.
They rather carelessly said they would, in a disingenuous attempt to stop party-faithfuls defecting to Mr.Farage.
And when it became clear that all Dave wanted from the EU was a continuation of UK sovereignty, personal passport & border controls and exemption from the Schengen Agreement, our PM came back from Brussels clutching a meaningless piece of paper, victorious like Chamberlain, and just as stupid.
On June 24th, regardless of outcome, we will still be;
Outside of an open-door policy for refugees & political migrants.
Outside of the Free Movement Schengen Agreement.
Inside an agreed TTIP agreement that will see the end of the NHS, and infinitely more adverts from Aetan, Molina, Cigna, Anthem and inevitably their paymasters, Gladstone Brookes.
Beholden to a government-ruling on expulsion of non-EU workers earning under £35k.
You see, we're damned if we do; and we're damned if we don't.
By voting Leave we side with the xenophobes and the fearful landed gentry.
We also side with the pub-bores who put all of our problems down to 'foreigners'.
But by voting Remain we condone the actions of this current Tory Administration, and the whole bandwagon continues to roll, ignoring the millions who voted in opposition to them, and inadvertently supporting a system that is antiquated and unfair.
I have always voted.
I value my vote in what remains of our neo-liberal democracy.
But I will not stand by and listen to the aforesaid pub-bores tell me that their grandparents fought & died for my right to vote badly.
Nothing changed after the poorly recognised referendum of 2011.
Because no-one really knew about it, and nearly everyone was either misinformed or confused, the assumption was 'Keep Calm & Carry On'.
It is now our duty to do the very same thing, even though this time we are being bombarded with opinion.
We should tell this government that when we are only given two shit choices, we have nothing else left to do but to create a choice of our own.
That choice is to abstain.
And I say this with a very heavy heart, but with hope for the future, and in the knowledge that it's ok to change your mind, whether as a European, or as a resident of the UK.
Yours Sincerely
Yanny Mac.
