We are in yet another referendum year unfortunately. It seems that we are never again to have a year without a vote of some sort, for some reason, being required of the people of the United Kingdom. General elections used to come round roughly every five years, occasionally more often in the days, not long ago, before fixed government terms, when the electorate and/or its parliamentary representatives lost confidence in the government of the day and forced it to go to the country to win or lose the mandate. Queen Victoria clearly didn't think much of such events. She wrote, "It seems to me a defect in our much-famed Constitution, to have to part with an admirable government like Lord Salisbury's for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes." As it happened, Lord Salisbury kept on winning elections to one extent or another until after the queen's death so she never did have to part with him.
Whatever the inconveniences of our Constitution in Victoria's eyes, increasingly, general elections are not enough for us, our elected representatives are not trusted to make decisions on our behalf. We want a direct say and referendums, unheard of events until the 1970s, are becoming a regular addition to a democratic merry-go-round that also includes the pleasures of airing our important opinions through online polls.
There is a precedent for the latest anticipated referendum on our membership of the European Union. The first ever referendum in any part of the British Isles was in Northern Ireland in 1973. It asked the Northern Irish people to decide whether they wished to remain part of the UK or join the Republic of Ireland to make Ireland an undivided country once again. They chose the status quo and the Irish 'troubles' with all their death and destruction continued unabated. Other referendums have followed over regional devolution since the first UK-wide referendum in June 1975 when the electorate voted 'yes' to stay in the European Community rather than leave. Forty-one years later here we are again trying to make sense of a tangle of opinions that may, in the poll booth, mean that people simply vote with their gut not their reason.
So many minds are already made up and complicated argument for or against continued European membership will fall on stony ground, not least because nobody can cut the huge issues involved into digestible and simply comprehensible pieces. I sat next to a successful businessman last night, ex-army, relatively cosmopolitan, who assured me that my always held view that this tiny country was nothing outside Europe was based on my parents' view that unity with Europe meant no more European wars. Well twaddle actually, he may have thought me very old but it was not my parents' generation who thought like that but the one before who had been born in the years leading up to, during, or shortly after World War I and had fought in World War II when my parents were still children.
On the other hand, they both, in their adult political careers, fought for a European unity that at all costs included our separated islands in the greater whole. I continue to believe we are much better in than out however much we may be irritated on occasion by petty pan-European directives and however much we fear the vast numbers of migrants that we seem to look on as a sort of plague of locusts rather than as human beings in need of our help. We do have considerable numbers of European migrants. While India remains the most common country of birth among foreign-born people living in the UK, Poland now has the greatest number of foreign citizens in the country.
And so... none of this and none of them give me any desire to rush out and haul up the drawbridge as Lord Salisbury might have done. His view of the national interest led to the coining of the term "splendid isolation" for the policy pursued during his premiership from 1895 to 1902. At the time this country - and let's leave aside here all questions of the goods and ills of empire - was the most powerful state in the world with the most successful economy, the largest empire and the largest navy too if it came to a fight.
And now... how are the mighty fallen - quite apart from the fact that dealing with our most obvious and immediate human problem, the refugees pouring in desperation into Europe, requires all of Europe to be involved in their futures if a solution to their tragedies is ever to be found. If we duck out of issues like that we are reduced as a people to the size you might expect of a rather small spot on the map. And that is set to get smaller more quickly than otherwise if we leave Europe. We might just hold the strands of union with Scotland together for a bit longer if we remain part of Europe as the Scots intend to do. With that deal broken, they'll be off quick as a flash and at that point I don't blame them either although they may suffer for it.
We may still have the fifth largest economy in the world but others are forecast to grow faster than us in coming years. As the extraordinary entrepreneur, Richard Branson, has pointed out, the attractions of the 60 million people in the UK to new emerging markets in Asia and South America, let alone renewed and extended trade relationships with North America, are more than a little outweighed by the 500 million population of the rest of Europe. We need to cling limpet-like to the continent we were once physically part of to have our proper role in the restructuring of Europe. We need and want to be in partnership with Germany, in particular. We have to continue to have Europe as our biggest trading partner, which it is by a country mile and to use that position, to quote the director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, John Cridland, as our "launchpad for UK business to trade with the rest of the world, carving out a new global role for ourselves".
The powers that be at Oxford University, led by Chancellor Lord Patten of Barnes have been fending off moves to have the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College pulled down or otherwise located to a place where proper notice of his crimes against humanity can better be given and all those Rhodes scholarships more easily ignored. Hmm. I thought tyrants tried to rewrite history. Students in countries that enjoy freedom of speech are meant to see and debate both the good and the bad openly, not hide it away and not suddenly become so infantile that they are upset by the image of a bogeyman. Everyone else can join in. We are very lucky.
