I was proud to take part, along with my family, in the People’s Vote march in London yesterday.
People’s Vote is meant to be a broad church for anyone who thinks there should be a public ratification of the outcome of the Brexit negotiations. But I’m not one of those: I want a People’s Vote with a Remain option and believe that that would win.
I’m an unapologetic Remainer. I did spend a while after the referendum thinking that it’s sad we have made ourselves powers by voting to leave but it won’t be all that bad. Since then I’ve come to realise that we are actually planning to impoverish ourselves financially and culturally for generations to come.
It might be, as some Brexiteers claim, that this needn’t have happened if we didn’t have an incompetent government. That might be true, though I doubt it, but we have to play the hand we are dealt: we do have an incompetent government and Brexit is going to be a disaster.
It was important to me to take my children on the march. I marched for them far more than for me, I want them to have all the opportunities and benefits membership of the EU brings. I want them to grow up in a time when we don’t hark back to world wars as some sort of national zenith and view foreign relations through that prism. I want them to grow up thinking more about our common humanity than how we can build walls between us and countries that should be welcome friends and neighbours. I resent that Brexit makes all that harder for them.
And that just makes me think marching wasn’t enough.
