WHY I WANT TO REMAIN BEING EUROPEAN

I’ve just been to Lisbon. I was blown away by how clean, organised and sophisticated it was. The sublimely warm and sunny weather helped. This was one of those basket case economies that after 2008 looked like bringing the EU down. Now exports are up, tourism is up and Portugal like Ireland is on a convincing road to recovery and growth.

My love affair with Europe grows. The thought of Brexit seems as insane as contemplating  suicide. What possible sense does resigning from the largest economy and the most exciting culture in the world make? The arguments that the petty bureaucracy of the EU is stifling may be fair but disliking our own HMRC would be a piffling reason for emigrating.

What I love about Europe is that it works. It is so civilised, peaceful and sensible. The Brexit politicians all seem so dreary, aggressive and unambitious. The stay-Ins, for their part, seem inhibited, and too embarrassed to say what they really feel.

Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking fast and slow” nailed the realities of decision making…that it was the intuitive System One part of our brains that called all the shots. It makes little sense to seek a list of whys and why-nots for most of us. We are either “Little Englanders” or we are Europeans/Global citizens in our gut. Maybe I should blame my parents who lived the first 15 years of their marriage in Spain for the way I intuitively lean.

It was in Portugal that I read Jean-Claude Piris (he sounds suspiciously foreign or, worse, French the Brexits might say). He used to be Director General Legal Services EU and has written a book called “If the UK Votes to Leave”.

It’s chilling stuff. Leaving the EU is not like resigning from a job or getting a divorce. It will take years of negotiation and the way the EU works they won’t make it easy for us. Our national aircraft will, as it were, be grounded for a very long time.

Our lawyers will have a field day or rather a field year or five redrafting legislation. Our 2million countrymen living in the EU may have a rather unpleasant time especially as Brexit would be accompanied by Britain taking repressive attitudes to the Eastern Europeans. Trade relations with the EU would not just carry on as normal…everything would slow down. Think it’s a bureaucratic morass now? You just wait.

But there’s all the rest of the world to trade with.

Well it’s actually not that simple. Many of our trade relationships are done through the EU so we’d have to redevelop those from a somewhat weaker position.  It’s no use comparing our position to Canada, Australia or Switzerland. By leaving the EU we’d be fundamentally changing the status quo.
Whichever way Brexit would be a very long and bloody mess.

And like Millwall FC no one would like us. But unlike Millwall I, and hopefully a majority of Britons, would very much care about that.

COME ON . YOU CAN DO IT!

I have to confess I have an irrational loathing of marathons. It’s a mixture of things. The ghastly costumes. The sweat. The tortured ligaments. The sheer jollity of it all. In fact in my family I was brought up to believe that the words “it was all very jolly” were code for “it’s horrible, tasteless and boring”.

Over the past two weeks jolly has been on few lips.  There’s been a tragic death of a young runner in the Brighton Marathon and the terrorist bombings in the Boston Marathon.  The fact the Chechnyan terrorists chose the marathon to express their angst seems bizarrely cruel especially as the destruction of human tissue happened to what the Boston surgeon grimly described as “lower extremities”.

But it would be a mistake to feel what’s happening now is exceptional.

It seems worse but it’s normal now for protestors with hate welling up inside to make protests where’ll they’ll get most coverage.

And talking of normal I loved a piece recently by Rod Liddle describing as normal the crowd violence at the Wigan v Millwall Cup Semi Final, which evoked such outrage. He depicted it as Man A asking Man B to sit down in, albeit, slightly colloquial language. Man A took exception and uttered words to the effect “Right, I’m going to fuck you.” Liddle patiently explained that this was not a brusque and compelling expression of sexual intent, merely a signal for a bit of fisticuffs.

With that wry observation the sun came out for me and the daffodils waved in applause. I realised all my grumpiness about people running for 26 miles or so in company with thousands of other maniacs was their choice and, anyway, they seemed to smile a lot. Let them, I thought, as I poured another glass of claret, let them, I allowed as I lit a cigar, yes, let them I conceded, have their fun.

So Rod Liddle made part of my week, George Bellows the other part. He’s the relatively unknown American Artist whose work is now being shown at the Royal Academy Sackler Gallery.

Here’s what Bellows (an example of whose work appears above) proclaimed as his philosophy of life:

“Try everything that can be done.
Be deliberate. Be spontaneous.
Be thoughtful and painstaking; 
Be abandoned and impulsive.
Learn your own possibilities.”

I was inspired by the sheer roundedness of this.

And then I briefly wondered if maybe I shouldn’t be impulsive too and think of running the Marathon after all.

Or whether, perhaps, the Millwall football fan slogan didn’t capture my ironic, Rod Siddle mood better:

“Nobody likes us but we don’t care.”

www.colourfulthinkers.com