The EU referendum exposing the cracks in British society

Hi guys. Some of you may have seen my video on the EU referendum but I thought I'd do a blog piece as well. In case I haven't made my feelings clear enough, I am very pro-EU and of course I am going to vote to the remain in the EU. Regrettably though, the referendum has brought out the very worst in British society and it has been deeply divisive. At the moment, it does look like we are going to vote to remain by a very slim majority, but a lot of it will depend on voter turn out on the day itself and either way it goes, it is going to be very close indeed. But then again, if British society was unanimous about the issue, then there wouldn't be a need for a referendum - the fact that there is no consensus on the issue allows us to put it to a vote and get a result which will seal the fate on the issue for at least a few decades. It enables us to say, "we voted, that's the result, so just accept it, that's the end of the matter, let's get on with life, okay?"

I thought it was a pretty bad idea to put this to a referendum in the first place because I don't trust the people of the UK to make the right choice on this issue. That is the problem with democracy, everyone gets a vote - including stupid people. They get a say, no matter how uninformed and ignorant they may be. The UK's membership of the EU is a very complex issue and there are valid reasons for both sides of the argument - however, it got ugly pretty quickly and the leave side focused on immigration and xenophobia. The EU became the scapegoat for all things wrong with the UK and leaving the EU was marketed as a magic solution that would somehow solve all the things that have gone wrong in the country. (Yeah, right.) A lot of the unemployed people moaning about "all the immigrants, coming over here, taking our jobs" have scarcely taken a moment to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they cannot get a job. Even if you kick out all the Eastern European migrant workers, these people are still pretty much uneducated and unskilled - now the issue would then be for the government to help these people acquire the right kinds of skills to be able to get a decent job; the UK's membership of the EU is pretty much a red herring. Do we have problems in the UK? You bet we do. Would leaving the EU solve anything? No, it wouldn't - it would just make things far worse.

You can argue till the cows come home - but people will vote the way they want to and many poorer, older, working class British folks will vote to leave the EU. I have had so many arguments on Facebook with the friends of my friends who want to leave the EU - one even said this, "I know leaving the EU will wreck the British economy, but I've got so little to lose and I'm so fed up with the system. If I can make the rich people suffer with me this way, then that will give me some satisfaction, that's why I am voting to leave." Good grief. I tried but I couldn't reason with him - I told him that if he hated rich people that much, he may as well become a suicide bomber and blow himself up in some fancy Mayfair restaurant. As soon as I wrote that, I thought, oh shit, have I gone too far - was that joke in really bad taste? Then he replied, "yeah, I might just do that. I fucking hate rich people." Oh dear. Such is the politics of envy in the UK.

But as horrific as that analogy may sound, it is actually pretty apt when you think about it. After all, during a suicide bombing, the person most likely to die in the process is the suicide bomber himself/herself - others may be killed or injured in the process, but it cannot happen without the suicide bomber taking the full brunt of the explosion. Likewise in the UK, the people most likely to vote for Brexit are those who are older, working class, uneducated, unskilled and poor - these are the people who are going to be hardest hit should the UK leave the EU. Why are they willing to literally take the full brunt of the explosion just to make a point then? Such behaviour defies logic: stock phrases like "turkeys voting for Christmas" and "cutting off your nose to spite your face" have been used a lot. I doubt the glee of showing just how xenophobic and anti-immigration they are cannot possibly outweigh the hardship they will face should Brexit happens. This has been dubbed a 'working class revolution' by some - but let me explain what is really going on.

This part of the story just gets uglier and uglier. Suicide bombers are often brainwashed - they believe they are dying for a just cause and they will go directly to heaven when they die, where 72 virgins await them there. Now the right wing press in the UK have been misleading their readers on so many basic facts about the referendum - anyone who is educated enough can see through their poorly written articles, but here's the problem and it is a very British one: the educated middle and upper classes read a certain kind of newspaper and the uneducated working class read trashy tabloids full of football news and semi-naked women. There is more soft-core porn than actual news in a lot of these papers and the readers of the newspapers are not educated enough to question what they read in these tabloids; heck they are barely literate and believe every word they read in there. The right wing politicians know that such voters are the easiest to deceive and manipulate, so they promise these people the equivalent of 72 virgins: that the UK would become stronger and better should we leave the EU. This is when politics does get very ugly because we have seen so much deceit, lies, manipulation - particularly when it comes to the least educated section of our society. We recoil in horror when a young, uneducated teenager is brainwashed to become a suicide bomber, yet we somehow accept it when the working classes are brainwashed and duped by the right wing press? Oh I am equally disgusted.

The UK is a very divided society but somehow, we have muddled along all these years without any major strife despite the status quo persisting all these years. Rich people send their children to expensive private schools where their children will grow up mixing with the children of other rich children. It is only at university where they may encounter some working class folks who have battled against the odds to earn a place at university, but even if they may sit in the same tutorial or lecture at university and exchange polite greetings, they are hardly going to hang out together by choice outside the learning environment. Once they graduate, the rich kids will go on to get good jobs thanks to their superior education (hey, money can buy you a better class of education) and their parents' connections and even if they do have working class colleagues, they may at best exchange polite greetings if they happen to work in the same office or sit across the table from them at the meetings, but again, they would rarely ever socialize with each other outside the context of work. These people would rarely live in the same areas and thus the rich would tend to socialize only with their other rich friends. This pattern reinforces itself over the years, decades and centuries.

The poor on the other hand would send their children to state schools where their classmates would be the children of other poor parents. Even if they work hard and get a place at a good university, they still lack the family connections to help them get a good job as easily as the rich kids. The odds are so stacked against them in every step of the way that social mobility is a huge problem in the UK. In my humble opinion, it is much easier for kids from working class backgrounds in Singapore to succeed and get good jobs because the concept of social class is far less rigid in Singapore than the UK. Without a referendum exposing the deep divisions in our society, people just get on with life, As long as there's food on the table, people have jobs to go to, the schools do a decent job in educating the children, no one will talk about some kind of class war or social revolution as long as they are distracted enough by the latest reality TV contest show or some celebrity scandal. The EU referendum however, has brought up so many very ugly feelings as neither side of the social divide want the other side to decide their fate for them when it comes to the EU.

This reminds me of my experience serving national service back in Singapore - I served a grand total of 2 years 4 months national service in Singapore back in the 1990s before I moved to the UK. I had to work alongside people from all social backgrounds whilst in the army: it was an interesting social experiment. I was once asked by a British person if this would foster better social cohesion in Singapore: after all, being forced to live and work alongside each other like that would expose you to people from different social backgrounds. His assumption was that we would all enjoy working with each other and the shared experience would somehow make us bond as friends. I had to tell him that his vision was somewhat idealistic: I learnt to keep my head down and stay out of trouble, but that was not the same as liking the people around me. At best, I silently tolerated having to work with people I had nothing in common with - at times, I resented their presence but kept my mouth shut since there was little I could do about it. I did make some good friends whilst in the army, but they were only with people who had a very similar social background. Don't get me wrong, I managed to get along with people from very different social backgrounds whilst serving in the army, but none of those working relationships never turned into real friendships outside the army camp.

As for me, I don't like the idea of any kind of event like a referendum creating more disharmony and discord in what is already a very divided society. Let's not kid ourselves over the issue - British people tend to be rather polite, but that politeness is but a veneer which covers up the cracks in our society and that decorum is not going to hold our society together in times of crisis. The pro-leave campaign has become extremely nasty and xenophobic and the pro-stay campaign has totally vilified the pro-leave camp for their bigotry and xenophobia. The two sides hate each other as the campaign has reached its climax in the final days. But after all the votes have been cast tomorrow and the polling booths finally close, regardless of the outcome, these two sides who currently hate each other have got to find a way to get along. Oh dear. Can we rely on British politeness and decorum to come to the rescue, after such an event has exposed just how divided we are as a society? Or will this lead to a more fundamental change in our society, as we shrug our shoulders and say, "who are we trying to kid?" I think people will try to go back to the way things were and some may even pretend that nothing has changed, but I think something fundamental has already changed for us.

So that's it from me on this issue. I am going to vote in the morning and we shall know the results of the referendum by very early Friday morning, UK time. Many have said it is too close to call and I am rather nervous. But really, it has gotten to the stage when I just can't wait to get the darn thing over and done with as I have had enough of the bitter squabbling, the horrible lies told by the leave campaign and I don't need to be reminded just how many uneducated, xenophobic, ignorant idiots there are in this country. I work hard and earn a lot of money just so I can have high walls around me, to shield myself from people like that in London. My fingers are crossed for now, many thanks for reading.