I shall be voting Out today. I urge you all to do the same.
fff
We have heard an astonishing amount of ugly rhetoric and sheer nonsense in this debate. Both sides have largely been full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Brexit will not open up a glorious new era of peculiarly shaped bananas and curvaceous cucumbers either. Nor, conversely, will it result in Armageddon, or reduce us to Zimbabwe-style economics, trundling wheelbarrows full of fifties into the shops to buy half a loaf.
I’ve genuinely been torn on this referendum, but I cannot get away from the fact that the EU is a profoundly undemocratic institution - everything else is beside the point. As Tony Benn so memorably put it, it is better to have a bad Parliament than a good King. This is a political union so opaque in its dealings it would not even pass its own standards for EU entry.
I am not a racist, a bigot or a xenophobe - I simply believe the democratic principle to be of the most paramount importance. Whatever the flaws in our own parliamentary system, we have a group of lawmakers elected by the people, scrutinised by the people and ultimately kicked out by the people when they screw up. How do I seek to dethrone Jean-Claude Juncker? Who voted for Van Rompuy? If we cannot hold the EU to such a democratic standard - and if the EU is unreformable, as Juncker confirmed today (along with forty years of experience inside) - to vote Remain would be to defend the utterly indefensible.