Friday, March 02, 2018

Democracy

This is from the EU's draft withdrawal agreement. It is fully in line with the government's stated policy.

Think about it. This means that your inalienable right to live, work, receive health care, start a business, raise a family, etc., in twenty-seven other countries (together with any of the other ones desperately hoping to join the EU in the future) will be taken away in perpetuity. It's not just you that it affects, but your families, your descendants, and all future generations. This is what EU citizenship gives. It gives you a right, not something that may be granted as a discretion by a host nation, but a right that you can freely exercise if you fulfil the legal requirements.

It's a right that I valued as I built my second life in Greece and it determined my decision to buy a house there. It's a right that has allowed friends of mine to settle there. It's a right that my neighbours from other EU countries retain.

As things stand, both the Conservative and Labour parties, the only conceivable parties of government in the UK, wish to strip you and I of that right against our wills. They do so in the name of a supposedly democratic decision, a narrow majority in a referendum. Around seventeen million voted in favour and sixteen million against. That means that those seventeen million get to impose their will on all sixty odd million Britons - and on the tens of million more yet to be born. They get to deprive them of their citizenship and limit their freedoms. Is this really democracy?

Think about it again. One of the items that I find too painful to watch on the news is the refugee crisis. It's the suffering. It's the exploitation. It's the desperation. It's the corpses washed up on beaches that we are used to thinking about solely in terms of Mediterranean holidays. What would would these people give for an EU passport? Well, they have shown us. They would give their lives. And hundreds die every year.

This is how valuable our European citizenship is. Yet we, with our complacent and pampered existence, are prepared to see something, which others would literally die for, taken from us for no good reason, other than a bad decision mandated by a flawed process.

Yes, think about it, think again, and then put a stop to this destructive madness.

1 comment:

SP said...

But I want a blue passport!