Wouldn't It Be Good If We Could Have A Positive Debate About Brexit

Brexit crept up on me.  I didn't take the possibility of a referendum on the subject actually being held seriously.  It didn't look much like David Cameron would win a majority in 2015 so it hardly figured in my thinking back then.   When he did win I didn't think he'd actually go through with it.   After all he came up with an elaborate pantomime about going to Brussels to negotiate a new relationship.  When to my surprise he actually called the referendum it didn't look at all likely the phobes would win.  

I hadn't even thought about which way I would vote.  I'd been sort of vaguely anti Europe when I was younger without really thinking about it.  Since then I'd come around to vaguely pro-Europe without any actual thought being applied to the process.  I just sort of accepted it as part of the landscape, and my personal experiences were on the whole fairly positive in a non-life changing way.  Common regulations saved me a lot of paperwork.  The brief spell when we could travel to Europe without a passport was nice, and I assumed would be coming back sometime.  

So basically I was totally unprepared for what came next.  The fist time I started thinking about it was on a work related Facebook group where someone I had previously taken to be sane started posting crazy anti-EU memes.  I took it on myself to refute them.  It was easy enough to do, but I was then accused of bullying her.  To which my response was I was quite happy with Brexit as a project.  If that was what people wanted I'd go along with it.  I just thought that the EU was a more interesting project.  And that I'd be happy to get behind whichever one won, and hoped that the winning margin would be big enough to settle the debate.

I'd come up with that as a rhetorical reply to back out of an argument that was obviously annoying other posters on the forum and to avoid making an enemy in my professional field.  But when I read it back I decided that it was actually how I felt about it.   And it was prophetic too. We did get a narrow result and the debate has continued.

But I think my point still stands.

I'd rather the debate was between two camps putting forward the positives about their projects. Something of a positive argument for Brexit has emerged.  For example what Gove is talking about with agriculture is an interesting challenge to the way the EU has been doing things. Boris' bridge was sort of the same, though it did have a bit of a greatest hits album because of lack of new material feeling to it. One bridge proposal is good. Two smacks of lack of imagination.

If there had been a lot more of this kind of thing and more ideas for how we are going to replace things like the EMA it would have been much easier for remainers like myself to get on board. As it is it feels like we are being invited to join the local gang spray painting the bus shelter to show how hard we are. No thanks.