MANIFESTO OF A RELUCTANT EUROPEAN

I have been campaigning some 2 months now for the 'Remain' vote in the EU referendum – the first time I have done anything like this 1966 (I could see the students I work with thinking: 'Did he really just say....1966?').

It's an odd experience, because to when I meet Brexiters, and they tell me why they want 'out', I tell them I agree with much of what they say. The EU is undemocratic (you can't vote its government out or, for that matter, in); the Euro has been a man-made disaster, condemning a whole generation in the south of Europe to worklessness and poverty; massive subsidies to one industry, farming, make no sense; we can't control our own borders, and immigration is putting intense pressure on services and housing in the South East; internationally, the EU has been hopeless, first provoking and then appeasing Putin, and endlessly dithering about the migration crisis; in many EU countries, xenophobic and racist parties are coming to power.

So why on earth, they ask, are you on the 'Remain' side? Because this isn't a vote on whether the EU is a good thing or not. It's not choice between a good thing and a bad thing. It's a choice between one unappealing but known option, and an unknown one that that promises utter catastrophe.

Here's why I am campaigning for 'Remain':

1. Brexit would mean an immediate, permanent and significant reduction in our economic well-being. The pound and stocks will slump, inflation and unemployment soar. Why so? The UK economy is desperately weak: we constantly miss targets for cutting the deficit, despite having cut and cut vital services that make this a civilised country, our balance of trade gap is one of the worst anyone can recall, out industrial base is gone, all our export markets are also slowing down. We still do reasonably well because we are a haven of stability and because we are a country that favours enterprise, yet which sits within the biggest free trade area in the world where we can freely sell our services. Leaving it, with no clear idea what will replace it in terms of trading agreements, or what other countries will agree to or how soon, is a mad action, in a world of global finance where investors are extremely nervous and capital can switch countries in an instant.
2. Brexit would break the UK apart – a funny result for British nationalists to aim for! The UK is my country: I would mind desperately if Scotland became 'abroad', which is what 'Brexit' is likely achieve. And would Ulster stay long, if Eire was the other side of the EU border, and booming? What remained would be a far from 'Great' Britain. We wouldn't even know what to call it.
3. Brexit would hugely damage the EU, worsen all its problems, greatly encourage Russian aggression. and weaken our efforts to stop Turkey drifting into Islamic dictatorship. Europe's problems will be still be very much ours, too - but we won't have any say in how to meet them. Indeed, we can expect only hostility from our European neighbours at the damage we would have done them.
4. We could not expect to be able to move as freely in Europe as we now do, and especially not to work there, and that is very bad news for the younger generation.
5. Nationalism, like it's more disreputable siblings xenophobia and racism, isn't to be bought off – it grows with what it feed upon. A very Irish friend say she over-heard the other day people saying in her workplace that if we leave, we needn't have all these Irish here – she wasn't sure if it was aimed at her or if so, whether it was entirely a joke. She felt uncomfortable, in a place where she'd thought herself fully at home. Brexit is a vote for increased suspicion and even hate between the many nationalities and races that inhabit the UK.

Campaigning is itself re-shaping my views. Oxford is a very international city, and out canvassing I meet many foreigners living and working here, from Europe and beyond. And when I ask what they are doing here, it is all so positive and future-looking – research teams drawn from the best the world has to offer, new tech companies and so on. We should surely be delighted such people want to come here. Others, less qualified, say that they can't prosper in their own countries because of oppression and corruption and bureaucracy, while they know that if you work hard here, you can make something of your life. These aren't people drawn here by our pitiful benefits or free but faltering healthcare (it may be different in other locations, I concede.) Yes, there are too many of them and I don't know what the answer is - but surely not to make the UK a poorer and less appealing place.

And when I speak to Brexiters, while some voice concerns I share, others, especially the elderly, strike me as essentially reactionary, resentful of much that has happened in their lifetimes. I'm struck by how unrealistic their expectations of Brexit sometimes are – streets full of British-made cars again, said one. Or, 'we shouldn't have so many Muslims'. Or, 'we can trade with the Commonwealth instead' (a young Australian I stopped said, 'stick with Brussels mate - for my generation, the Commonwealth is just stuff in history books').

Exposed to these influences, I begin to accept what my children have long been telling me – that the age of traditional national identify and national borders is fading, and something more fluid and international is taking shape. And to see that might be a positive, promising thing, that might outweigh the pain of sloughing off some of the past. I have begun to see Brexit as essentially a hopeless attempt to turn back the clock – hopeless, because I don't believe history ever works like that. History is not stasis, it is not the imagined golden age, but change, continuous, challenging, difficult change. Brexit wouldn't land us safely back in 1960, but somewhere quite different. Better to swim with the current and to make for somewhere appealing, than exhaust ourselves trying to swim back upstream.

I also begin to think, if we do remain, we shouldn't settle any more for just staying in reluctantly, jeering from the sidelines at the mess the foreigners have made. We should get stuck right in, take up the leadership of Europe, make the damned thing work, or at any rate, make it slightly less of of a demoralised failure. I even found myself thinking: if it were really democratic, would a united Europe be such a very bad thing? – before I come to my senses and recall how deeply happy we are with Westminster, and how wonderfully well it serves us.

Looking at the national campaign, no politician emerges from the campaign with any credit. Cameron has played roulette with the country's future in order to stay in power (and seemingly, may now have failed even at that). In his slur against Obama and absurd invocation of Hitler, Johnson has revealed himself to be unfit for high office, lacking judgement and self control: beneath the schoolboy jokes, schoolboy nastiness. Corbyn has let us down unforgivably by his too late, too lukewarm entrance to the fight, praying in aid an abstract, idealistic internationalism that means nothing to 99% of the British people. The referendum offered him a huge open goal – hopelessly split Tories risking deeper and longer recession in pursuit of atavistic and unrealistic nationalism – which he then studiously ignored. Corbyn's weakness isn't his 'extremism' – it's that he simply isn't a politician at all, in the sense of working out what people think and then pushing them and energising them in his direction. He has also, by endorsing Remain while seemingly remaining privately anti-EU, blown his reputation for fearlessly speaking what he thinks. Farron remains the Invisible Man of British politics – what is wrong with that guy? Only Gordon Brown has shown real statesmanship, breadth of vision, and a fluency and conviction that was utterly lacking when he was in power.

This referendum raises questions about the use of referenda to settle settle huge, complicated long term issues on which the country is divided. Yes, you can count up the votes and say A got so many more than B, but you haven't solved the division in the nation, in fact have made in much more obvious and bitter. And if the country were to be committed to a radical change of direction on a 1% difference, on a turn out of 60%, with half the electorate not bothered or just confused or bored, and another 6 million adults not registered at all – is that really a triumph for democracy? I am not saying we'd rather not have a vote, but doing this way hasn't felt too good.

None of us know what the result will be. The pollsters are still confounded by their collective failure on the 2015 election. And a one off referendum is far harder to predict, because so many are still undecided, and because polling relies so heavily on the precise weighting of a very small sample - for willingness to actually vote on the day and so on. And for a referendum there are no historic data to support weighting. So we're flying blind, really.

My own instinct is that it may well be a narrow majority for 'Leave'. I say that partly on these facts – we know that the age group most in favour of 'Leave', the over 55s, are almost all registered and about three quarters of them do actually vote. We know that the age group most in favour of 'Remain', 18-25, only about two thirds are registered and barely half vote. So one old person has three times the say of one young person. The incontinent nostalgia of the old triumphs over the bovine apathy of the young - where was our Bernie Sanders?

I also sense, out canvassing, that the 'leave' vote is solidifying, crystallizing out of the 'don't knows' as it were, while the 'Remain' vote stays somewhat soft:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I see in the typical Brexiter – who end to be over 40, white, not university educated, not in the liberal professions – a sort of truculent determination. They've been told for so long that they simply mustn't talk about immigration – mustn't even think about it. Now at last someone is saying their worries are legitimate and yes they can do something about it, that if they vote 'Leave' the foreigners will go, and the jobs and houses will be available for them and their children. They close their ears to warnings of economic catastrophe and march determinedly towards the precipice.

I dread a 'Leave' vote, as I have never dreaded any election result (which, after all, can always be reversed after the winner has 5 years to show what a disastrous mistake voting them in was). 'Leave' would set us irreversibly on a different historical path, one I believe would doom us to be a substantially poorer, fractured, smaller, more inward and backward-looking country, an object of pity and derision internationally, and with Scotland gone, a rump even less sure of its identity than now, our European neighbours blaming us for the damage we have done, and we in turn blaming them, and each other, for our new status as excluded has-beens - a sad place indeed to live in. A place to emigrate from, not to.

Can we really be about to commit such a monstrous act of deliberate self-harm?