Tuesday, March 14, 2017

"Deciding our future" versus "taking back control"

It is very sad to see people from the left such as Jeremy Corbin and some in his team accepting the logic of self-determination referendums. It is not the "will of the people" or "democracy" that is prevailing, but utter confusion and a slippery slope that may take us back to a logic of government more typical of the Middle Ages than of the XXI century. It seems that those acritically in favour of the wrong type of referendums do not think about the ultimate consequences of what they are proposing, consequences that we are starting to see in front of our faces. If the "will of the people" is that 52% of a given population agree that they do not want something, then it is not surprising that some of the sub-populations where the remaining 48% live argue that the will of "their" people is that they do not share those feelings and therefore that they want to secede from the first population. For example, the leader of the Scottish nationalists claims the right of the "Scottish people" to decide its own future (although Mariano Rajoy may want to have a say). She could have said that she wants the Scottish people to "take back control." Or the Brexiteers could have said that they wanted to decide their own future (well, actually probably they already did). Meanwhile, Northern Ireland may become as a result physically separated from the rest of its own island through a hard border, or perhaps not and they also have the wrong kind of referendum (unlike the one that gave them peace in the 1990s, based on an international general agreement) and then 51% of them decide to secede from the UK. Then perhaps the protestant minority may argue that the will of their own people is to secede from Northern Ireland and have a system of walls and checking points similar to the one in Palestine. And so on and so forth until we have neighbours seceding from each other and at the end each individual waves a different flag in the roof of his or her house. This is the slippery slope to the Middle Ages. Thank you, David Cameron.

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