BREXIT... DO YOU CARE?

I've been interested in politics since for ever.

I really can't imagine why anyone wouldn't be. After all politics, quite literally, rules your life. It makes the laws you have to live by, it decides your taxes, and if your unlucky enough to need them, the benefits you get when you're sick or old or unemployed. It is in charge of your schools, hospitals, roads, rubbish collection...and almost everything else in your life.

There a bits of it that are tedious beyond belief, but, as it regulates every bit of your life, you'd have to be vaguely dense not to take an interest in it. 

(The fact that politicians don't really want you to take an interest should tell you something.)

I've believed for a very long time in an independent Scotland, and I played an enthusiastic, if small, part in the referendum campaign both here with Munguin, and out on the streets.

But for all my interest in politics, I have to say I have virtually no interest in the EU referendum. Maybe it's because I'm so sickened by the broken promises made by Cameron and Gordon Brown that I no longer care what happens to Britian. (Devo max, or devo super max as was promised by a Better Together representative on nationwide tv, has turned out to be a few relatively useless extra powers.) 

I've been a relatively enthusiastic supporter of the EU over the years. I've often been paid a salary from their funds, and I enjoyed an 'employment exchange' through an EU project where I worked at a University in France. In short it has been good to me personally.

But I've also seen many good projects paid for by EU matched social funding; projects that were able to do infinitely more because of money from Europe. I know too, that Scotland gets a far better deal from Europe than does England... Wales and Northern Ireland do even better than Scotland.

That said there are many things wrong with the EU, as there are with any government... not least the idiotic trek between Brussels and Strasbourg. I have no problem with Cameron trying to get one or two little changes made. I'd be happy if he would attack that one.

But, as you might expect for a politician like him, he is doing it all wrong. The whole point of the single market is that rules apply across the Union (the EU plus the countries of EFTA which join to make the European Economic Area). 

The EU doesn't tell people what benefits to pay, what taxes to charge, what their minimum wage should be, or many other things. All it says is that in a single market, what you do for your own people, you must do for others.

So, if you pay in-work benefits to your own population (because the wages are so pathetically low that people can't live on them), then you must do it for people from other EEA countries.

It's not a level playing field... or a single market... if only British people get tax credits, making them the only people who can afford to take low paid work and pay high rents.

Cameron has a problem with his back benchers who have a natural disinclination to like anyone who isn't English...and I do mean English as opposed to British. (Didn't Gideon Osborne say that Scots were a rowdy and disruptive element in the Commons?) 

Tory MPs don't like immigrants and they don't like foreigners telling Brits what to do. After all, the Brits ran a quarter of the world single handed. They don't need some damned foreigner telling them how to run dear old Blighty (or blighted).

I seem to have spent half my life listening to Tories, the Sun, the Daily Mail and Express and the Telegraph blaming everything on the EU, and immigrants, and foreigners in general. There's hardly a day goes by without one of these papers doing their damnedest to stir up racial tensions.

Never mind all the figures that show that EEA immigration has been incredibly good for the economy. Never mind that without them we wouldn't have any plumbers or electricians, our hospitals would fall apart and crops would lie mouldering in the fields.

Cameron will probably fail to get what he wants. Of course a population of 60 million is a huge market (although it seems to me that everything you see in the shops comes from sweat shops in China), so the other countries won't want to lose the UK from the union. But they have made it clear that there will be no treaty changes. These facts would get in the way of a good moan about damned foreigners.

Whatever he comes back with in February, it will not satisfy his Eurosceptic back benchers. And Britain may be moving closer and closer to an exit.

And, you know what? I don't care. There will be advantages and disadvantages of a Brexit, but the disadvantages will be more keenly felt here in the Celtic nations. (Unless the UK government can stump up a considerable amount for Northern Ireland, I can see there being a strong movement in the province, towards Dublin.)

There's a possibility that if Scotland votes heavily to stay in, and England votes to come out, then a second referendum will ensue. I doubt that could be a bad thing. 

Probably for that reason alone I will vote to stay in.

I'd like to know what you guys are feeling about it...