I avoid speaking presumptuously about my political views in front of choirs that I regularly conduct.  This is a personal view and assessment of my thoughts on where we stand today as a country.  I had thought to add this to the bottom of Blog No.20 as it seems to tie in with the spirit of Beethoven. I will probably edit it and tidy it up in future, but time is against me now and I want to send it out, for what it’s worth, at the same time as the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 blog.

For me the prospect of Brexit weighs even more heavily than Covid. I haven’t done a comprehensive count, but it is true enough that much of the world is ruled by people (well, let’s admit chaps, almost always men) whose main objective is retaining power and denying freedom at various levels. China, Russia, Myanmar, India, much of South America and Africa.  We are witnessing what I hope will be a failed attempt by the so-called ‘leader of the free world’ to do something profoundly undemocratic in trying to retain the power he is about to lose - a ‘loser’ as he so likes to say about the many who challenge him, including many of his own appointees who have ceased to support him.

Are we, the United Kingdom, really leaving the most successful alliance in the history of the world because of fish and some nebulous ideas about sovereignty? European nations fought each other two or three times a century for hundreds of years, usually in some far-off field somewhere.  Then came the 20^th century with unconcluded business in 1918, and the realisation by 1945 that the next war might be the last. Many nations finally came together understanding that war would now destroy too much and was too devastating a prospect for the survival of living species on the planet. Peace was secured in Europe progressively and painstakingly through binding mutual agreements whose main aim was to prevent individual countries from trying to gain the kind of unfair advantage which had historically led to conflict.  Crucially, each country signed up to a set of agreed laws concerning the protection of human rights within their own countries as well as across borders. Europe has enjoyed peace for longer than possibly any time in its history. I am not suggesting that the UK is planning to break that peace, but the EU aims to protect us from allowing any such process to begin, both internally and externally.

The ‘Britain rules the waves’ era covering more than two centuries had caused great tension with some of our nearest neighbours having similar aspirations, and which boiled over finally and most tragically in the first half of the 20^th century.  As a nation and as part of a mutually inclusive trade club based on democracy and the rule of law, we are stronger without that.  It is beyond pathetic to think of sending out navy vessels to protect ‘our fish’.  It’s equally pathetic to have a government announcing increased expenditure of its population’s money to build its own rockets when we have the umbrella of NATO. We can accept that there is and should be a discussion over how much individual nations contribute towards mutual defence. 

I live in Kent, which seems to be becoming the open-air toilet of the nation, its main artery to Europe clogged by lorries without appropriate facilities, villages being horribly compromised through noise and pollution (and the smell of urine), with lorry parks springing up under Government emergency legislation without local consultation, and the lorry drivers' plight worsening all the time despite government announcements. This was already happening before the latest Covid emergency magnified the problem. Manufacturing and finance services are slowly draining away to mainland Europe and Ireland, to be replaced by 50,000 civil servants paid by tax-payers, processing paper work which no-one other than another 50,000 civil servants, will ever have time to read or consider.  One should look around the rest of the world and the billions of people who have never known freedom and democracy, some of whose leaders make it their business to threaten and cheat, and who do so through corruption and by imprisoning their own people either in the name of some political ideal which they have stolen and re-interpreted for their own advantage, or in the name of religion. 

With all its imperfections, Europe is the part of the world which lives and works most successfully. Over the years I have become European first, and British second. I feel it. I am European in the personal and political sense. I have two half-German grandchildren.  Members of my choirs have left to go back to their European countries as they assessed the turmoil awaiting them in the UK. The British can best aspire to be ‘world leaders’ through education, science and mutually supporting action against climate change. In many areas we are hugely successful at this, but that doesn’t make us ‘world leaders’ in every sphere, and it’s frankly embarrassing, when one has European friends, to hear such sentiments being uttered by our so-called leaders.  We have been at the forefront, together with our friendly neighbours, of some good European development, but we have not ‘led Europe’ as some proclaim.  I try to suppress my anger concerning political leaders who are intent on sending desperate people ‘home’, or a Polish-born MP whose country of origin since 1989 has enjoyed great freedom for the first time ever in its history (despite its currently dysfunctional government), and who is now one of the strongest advocates of Brexit in the UK. I wouldn’t mind if he ‘went home’. 

I am also reflecting on the great European (EU) expansion which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, a regime which also imprisoned whole populations within their own countries. The victorious, but brutal Russian regime under Stalin justified its incursion in 1945 into most of eastern Europe, never wanting to face again what had been inflicted so catastrophically on them in the 2^nd World War, and before that Napoleon. We should never forget, as just one relatively small example in the great quantity of human lives lost, that half the population of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) starved to death in the first winter of the 900-day siege of 1941-1944. That is why we mark Remembrance so movingly each year. ‘Never again’.

The countries of Eastern Europe have been the beneficiaries of huge amounts of EU expenditure since 1989.  There is more to be done, but it seems to me that, as well as raw benefaction, the ‘selfish gene’ is at work in this process. We trade with them, and it helps us all to gain from giving them a leg up to share their new-found democracy and freedom. That is the big picture despite some setbacks in countries which try to break the rules. The ‘selfish gene’ element is that with the guarantees which allow them to be under the European umbrella, we are also at peace with them. Peace in democracy brings prosperity and happiness. Conflict destroys people and economies for decades. Totalitarian regimes steal all the wealth for those in power.  We benefit from the newly democratic countries feeling of growing to be like us…and I mean Europe.

What is ‘Little England’ possibly going to gain from leaving these friends, even in the very unlikely event that it might make us more prosperous, and how is that to come about with the climate emergency confronting us all, shouting ‘stop’? The EU is a philosophy, and the equal market helps us fulfil that philosophy.  It’s about peace and cooperation, and as an adolescent in the 1960’s, I can say it’s about ‘Peace and Love’. The process of Brexit is an affront to democracy.  A ‘first-past-the-post’ government forces more than half the population through a process by bullying and deception. It is very different from a policy such as opening shops on a Sunday which may displease some but not fundamentally in the way Brexit is doing to us. Less than 52% of the 72% of the electorate who turned out voted for it.  Therefore 63% of the United Kingdom has not voted for it. The sea-change confronting all our lives is alarming and makes me feel physically unwell.  And embarrassed. Of those 37% who voted leave, most may not regret it (yet), but they were fed propaganda and most did not have the knowledge to question it.

Oh, so we ‘won the war’ and should ‘stand alone’ again. Do they really not understand that a combination of the most powerful nations came to our rescue in the cause of freedom and democracy?  We couldn’t conceivably have done it alone, for all the undoubted bravery and suffering that many of our own people endured.  We were not invaded and did not have to experience the terror that befell those countries which were. It seems strange, and not of our time, that we should aspire to some illusory sense of might that in earlier times was sustained though military force (East India Company) and prospered through slavery.  ‘Britons never, never, never…’. 

I hope I wake up in my lifetime to find that it has all gone away, that we can share equally the cultural riches of Europe, that performers can exchange visits with European countries without the obstacles that seem to be being set up, that we can visit our neighbours’ countries without the fear of becoming ill and having to negotiate with insurance companies, and that we can stop paying billions of pounds which could better be spent on supporting those in our own country who need help.

Let us come back together.

Richard Cooke
23^rd December 2020