Regular readers of this blog will, I hope, excuse me for canvassing the opinions of people over the age of 59 and just from the UK, but this is a little piece of research just to guage an idea I had. I will not say what the idea is now but I will later, I just don’t want to colour the results. Please share this with as many people 59 or over from the UK as you can.
Thanks for taking part with an honest answer and please let as many people who had the chance to vote in that Referendum know, then the results will be meaningful.
As far as I know there is no way for your answer to be identified with you unless you comment, which you are welcome as always to do. Certainly I can’t do it, so please answer with confidence.
It’s time to leave my own comment on this, explaining what I was doing in the above and whether it turned out as I hoped for/expected.
What the results of our small poll here show, at least to date, is that the distribution of those who voted between those voting in favour and those against is broadly in line with what we were told the election result was.
This is reassuring. I was far from sure that we would not see a completely different picture, fuelling my fears that the vote-rigging which is so commonplace these days had already gone on back then and that we actually entered the EU under false pretenses in the first place. Assuming no similar rigging has gone on here – which is not likely as I didn’t say what I was trying to find out – the above results indicate that probably we were told the truth about what British people actually wanted back then, when I was just a small boy, too young to vote, and the majority of folk living today in Britain had not yet been granted a soul.
I voted enthusiastically “yes”. This was mainly for cultural reasons, as I was interested in languages and foreign travel, and I was attracted by the idea that if France & Germany were joined economically they would never go to war (and drag us into one), and it seemed good to be a part of that. I also allowed myself to be convinced that it was economically in our best interests. The idea of being able to travel to a mainland European country to work without too much fuss also appealed.
However, a lot has happened since then, and if there was a vote to come out, I am honestly not sure what I would vote. I’m not a UKIPer or a little Englander and certainly not a racist. However, I am not sure that I like what the EU has become. An undemocratic corrupt nightmare, and the problems of Greece show what can happen when a weak nation gets caught up in that nightmare. (Thank goodness, we didn’t join the Euro, although I once wanted us to – I know better now).
Going back to 1975, while it made a lot of sense for Germany and France to get together (much earlier, of course), and also probably Belgium and Holland, and possibly Italy, it made less sense for us. Looking back, if we were going to have a tighter union with anyone, it should have been with the Scandinavians. We were members of EFTA with them, and perhaps EFTA could have been beefed up a little. EFTA still exists, much reduced. I heard an EFTA topbod speaking on the radio news recently, and they’d like us back! (Would only make sense with the Scandinavians, IMO).
And the EEC didn’t seem to help our economy much; in fact, we seemed to go downhill fast from about the mid-1970s. Not all the fault of the EEC (there were several oil crises as well), but I don’t think it helped. It actually probably hindered us as much as it helped, because our exporters didn’t have to try so hard to be competitive in order to export to Europe, so we got a bit flabby and complacent, as seems often to be the way in the UK. Then we seemed to give up on engineering & manufacturing (although the Germans certainly didn’t). We were going to depend on the “Financial Services Industry” to save our bacon. And look how that turned out.