“The people have spoken.”  Yes.  They have.

“Their voices must be heard.”  Yes.  That’s a given.  We can’t choose whether or not we hear something.

“Their voices must be listened to.”  No.  You can’t force people to listen.

“Their voices can be listened to.”  Yes.  We can choose to listen.  We might then understand what is being said.

So what is it that the people of Britain actually said in the referendum result?  Let me just summarise how we got to the referendum in the first place.

There was a problem to do with the EU.  Some people knew this because they were in pain.  Because they were in pain they were not calm.  Because they were not calm they could not work out exactly what the problem was, although they knew it was there because of the pain.  Because they were not calm and couldn’t say exactly what the problem was, the only thing that other people could see was lots of people shouting about the EU.  They couldn’t even see that there was a problem.  However, most people wanted a solution either because they wanted the pain to stop or they wanted the shouting to stop.  Our elected representatives thought about this.  Some of them said:  “We should leave the EU.  That would stop the pain.”  Some of them said “We should remain in the EU.  We can just ignore the shouting.”  They couldn’t decide what to do.  They thought that if they asked the people then perhaps we could decide.  So they did.

Suppose that our elected representatives were trying to decide whether apples were better than pears.  They can’t decide, so they ask us “Are apples better than pears?”  Then people who like apples best are likely to just vote apples and people who like pears best are likely to just vote pears.  People who aren’t sure or who like both or who like neither might not vote.  Or they might try lots of apples and lots of pears and attempt to choose which they like best.  Lots of them will find it really difficult to choose.  The result comes out and it says “52% Apples, 48% Pears”.  People who like apples best are happy.  People who like pears best are sad.  People are now divided into two groups called Apples and Pears.  Lots of people are still arguing about whether apples are better than pears.  Some people are even fighting about it.  Some people who weren’t sure, but ended up voting Apples, are sad about what is happening and wonder if things would have been better if they had voted Pears.

So what is it that the people have said?  What does all this tell us?  If we think it tells us that “The people have decided that apples are better than pears” then I think that we haven’t listened at all.  If we think it tells us that “The people can’t decide either, so we haven’t learned anything” then I think that we haven’t listened closely enough.  However, I think that if we listen really closely we might just hear ourselves saying, clearly and in one voice:  “That is a silly question.”  It is silly because it cannot make anything better.  It can’t solve the problem, because we haven’t even worked out what that is yet.  It hasn’t stopped the pain; it has just moved it from some people to some other people.  And it certainly hasn’t stopped the shouting.

What we need to do is to go right back to the beginning and do it properly this time.  I don’t mean hold another referendum.  I’m not quite ready for another one of those just yet.  The first thing to do is to work out what the problem is.  To do that we need to be calm.  When we are calm we will be able to listen to one another.  If we do that, then we will be able to work out what the problem is together.  This will allow a real solution to emerge.  Perhaps in a surprising way.

This post was going to be a look at why the argument “The EU keeps us safe from another World War” did not decide my vote in favour of Remain.  However, an exchange last night on Facebook, in response to my first post, has resulted in this actually being about a deliberate, yet vital, omission from that post:  faith.

I rarely talk about my identity as a Christian.  I have not hidden it from people around me but I have lacked the faith to attempt to express to myself and others what it means.  In my first post I described the difficulty I had in deciding how to vote and in particular how I had planned to vote at lunchtime but was unable to commit to doing so until a moment of clarity came to me later on in the day during the children’s swimming lessons.  In writing that first post I was afraid that if I identified as a Christian then it would put up barriers:  An identity can be used as a label; labels can lead to assumptions being made; assumptions can make it hard to hear.  I was afraid that people might think that I was claiming divine justification for my vote.  I was afraid that I was claiming divine justification for my vote.

The conflict in my attempts to decide how to vote was that whilst I wanted to vote Leave, I felt that as a Christian I ought to vote Remain.  Although I now know that there was prior evidence to the contrary, I had assumed all along that most Christians would vote Remain.  I wanted to vote Leave because of things like waste and poor decision making and lack of accountability.  Things that seemed earthly.  I felt that as a Christian I ought to vote Remain because of things like building peace and loving your neighbour.  Things that seemed heavenly.  It shouldn’t have been a conflict, but it was.

The advice during the referendum campaign from many church leaders was that people should inform themselves and pray.  Although I felt that my attempts at both were inadequate, I did try to inform myself and I did try to pray.  However, the question in my prayers was “”Which is the right choice to make?”  I was asking for divine justification.  This was a prayer that God could never answer.  For God, there may not have been a right or a wrong choice.  But if there was, and he had showed me which was the right choice then he would also have revealed to me that everyone who had made the other choice was wrong.  That level of knowledge would come with a level of responsibility that I could not bear.

I had planned to vote at lunchtime but was not ready to commit.  At that point my prayer changed in a way in which I’ve only just realised.  Despairing of ever knowing which was the right choice, I prayed “OK then, just tell me what you want me to do”.  The moment of clarity came during the children’s swimming lesson, in a still, small voice of calm.  This was the answer to my prayer.  It was simply “You know what I want you to do.”  And I did.  In that moment I had faith.  Faith did not take the pain away from voting, but it did give me the strength to vote.

I anticipated many consequences of the EU referendum and feared most of them.  That I would write a blog about my faith is something that I did not anticipate.  That moment of clarity is still with me.  It will probably fade, but although I ask myself the question “How long will it last?”, I am  not worried about the answer.  I am a sceptic (“a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions”).  If I go on, as I had intended, to look in more detail about issues surrounding the EU, then this will become apparent.  I question all of my experiences:  everything that I hear, read, see or do.  Until now this has seemed fruitless.  It has just broken those experiences down into fragments.  But, however hard I have tried, I could never put the fragments back together in any way that truly made sense of anything.  I looked, but I could not see.  That I can now argue my case for voting Leave is but one effect of all this.  I now think of many problems that previously seemed intractable in new and surprising ways.  I have no original thoughts, but now those fragments of my experiences coalesce in new and surprising ways.  Today I see more clearly.

What is God’s purpose in all this?  People who I trust, people who I expect to agree with because of our similar identities, made a choice difference to mine in the referendum.  Maybe God’s purpose in all our choices is that as the shock slowly subsides we can reach back out to those people that we thought we knew and trusted.  The choices we made are perhaps not as important as what we can learn about each other by listening to our stories about how we made those choices.  As we learn about each other the wounds we now feel keenly may start to heal.  And as we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves.  Perhaps in surprising ways.

You may have noticed that the UK has just held a referendum on its membership of the European Union.  I voted, with a heavy heart, to leave.  Although I was surprised by the result (52% Leave, 48% Remain), it brought me no joy.  However, I would make the same choice again, one which was made after much soul searching in what I believed then, and still believe now, are the best long term interests of my country.

After some reflection, I have decided to share my main reasons for voting Leave, not in order to justify myself, or persuade anyone that they got their vote wrong, but in the hope that it may help some of the devastated Remain voters to know that some people who voted Leave did so on a rational basis that was not based on isolationism and xenophobia.  It goes without saying that I speak only for myself, but I hope that if we can start to understand one another better, then the referendum result and the future of the UK may start to seem less scary.  An honest and rational campaign debate would have helped pave the way for that understanding, whatever the outcome had been.  It is to be mourned that our elected representatives were unable to provide this.

At the start of the campaign my feeling was that I wanted to vote for a third option that would not be on the ballot paper:  To remain in an EU that is not the one that currently exists (a simpler EU whose main purpose was to ease trade between nations).  Trade builds relationships, which help to break down barriers and foster the noble ideals of peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding.  However, I thought that belief in these ideals would lead me to vote Remain and reluctantly put up with the things that I didn’t like about the EU.  From the conversations that I had had with people, this position did not seem unusual.  But how was I to decide which of the two boxes that would actually appear on the ballot paper I would cross?  I knew that I would have to cross one of them.

I decided that I would have to find out more about the ways in which membership of the EU affects our lives, in order to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages and reach an informed decision.  It quickly became apparent that the official campaigns were unlikely to provide much in the way of useful information, although I still kept an eye and an ear on the news to keep track of what was going on.  I therefore obtained some suitable reading material, read it, thought about it and discussed ideas with people.  I could say much on many issues, but what I came to realise was that advantage or disadvantage on a particular issue could rarely be determined with any degree of certainty.  I am a mathematician, so I look for proof and certainty.  I found myself in the realm of arguments and principals, and those very much depend on the prism through which one views the world and, in particular the EU.  I needed a corner stone around which arguments could be carefully built that would make sense of the whole thing.

I make it sound like a carefully planned and executed operation.  The reality was a jumble of reading, thinking, wondering, despairing, talking and listening, all the while hoping and trusting that somehow there would eventually be clarity.  This finally came late on polling day.  I had planned to vote at lunch time, but although I knew by then that I wanted to vote Leave, I could not commit to doing so.  I therefore left it and at some point during the children’s swimming lessons clarity came and I felt that I had made a decision I could stand by.  I was relieved and thankful, and so dragged the children to the polling station on the way home.  However, voting was a terrible moment.  Decisions rarely come easily to me and all along I had been torn by having to choose between two deeply unappealing options.  This was hardly helped by having come to the conclusion that the consequences of either result would be awful:  An immediate release of hurt, despair and economic panic in the event of a Leave majority, or in the event of a Remain majority an insidious papering over of the cracks and passing on of the issue for the next generation to deal with once it had festered some more.  In the polling booth, both boxes loomed out of the voting slip like big red self-destruct buttons.  I pressed the one that said Leave.

Why did I do this?  In the end, I came to realise that I could not vote Remain because I do not believe in the principal of “ever closer union”.  To put up with an imperfect EU and vote Remain because of the good things that come out of it is one thing, but to vote Remain when I disagree with a fundamental principal of the EU, when that principal is not necessary to foster those ideals of peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding and it furthermore ripples out impacting negatively on important issues, would be quite another.

The principal of ever closer union has been at the heart of what is now the EU right from its earliest beginnings as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951.  It was because of this that the UK did not join the ECSC and as a result was not in the EEC when that was founded.  When we later joined the EEC, and when the 1975 referendum was held, the arguments were mainly economic and the principal of “ever closer union” was deliberately downplayed by our politicians (as some pro-EEC campaigners from the time have admitted).  At a time of huge economic uncertainty, when the EEC would have appeared to be all about trade, it probably didn’t seem that important.  Perhaps few people realised how far and how fast ever closer union would happen.  The result of all this is that our relationship with the EU is founded at best on misunderstanding, at worst on a lie.  People in the UK can justifiably look at the EU now and say that it is not what they signed up for.  The EU can justifiably say that it is exactly what we signed up for.  This is at the heart of the problem of our relationship with the EU.

Over the years, the UK has developed what David Cameron has called a “special status” within the EU.  I would characterise this as having one foot in and one foot out:  a status that still fosters resentment at home about the EU doing more than people think it should whilst also fostering resentment in Europe about the UK not making good on its commitment to ever closer union.  This is not a good basis for building relationships with our neighbours.  In addition, this status is not tenable in the long term, whatever safeguards Mr Cameron did or did not manage to negotiate for it.  All of the newer EU members are committed to joining the Euro in due course.  Once 25 of the 28 (now 27) members are in the Euro the EU cannot but act solely in the interests of the Euro zone.  It would be unreasonable of us to suggest otherwise.

I do not believe that ever closer union is necessary to foster peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding.  I do not believe that it is a goal that the majority of people in the UK truly believe in.  One lesson that I take from the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, 300 years on from the act of union, is that many people value nationhood and self-determination very highly.  Another lesson I take is that these ideals can be pursued hand in hand with those of peaceful coexistence and mutual understanding.  Moreover, I believe that the speed at which ever closer union has happened has caused deep divisions in society, not just in the UK but in many countries across Europe.  Governments should not, of course, just follow the will of the people.  We elect them to lead and take decisions on our behalf.  At times they need to take tough, unpopular decisions in the long term interests of the whole country.  But they also need to take the people with them on that journey and not leave vast chunks of the population behind.  The rise of far right politics across Europe is of great concern.  However, the lesson I take from history is that this happens as a result of deep rooted problems in society.  The cause of these problems in our time is, I believe, in a large part due to the EU and the speed with which it has pursued ever closer union.  This has benefitted some parts of our societies, but left others behind.  Their voices matter and deserve to heard and respected.

There have been many times at which the EU could have changed course by dropping or limiting the principal of ever closer union, but has chosen not to do so.  The EU has been very clear that it will not do so.  There is no reason why the EU should change course because of one country, although I believe that to do so would be in the best interests of all Europeans.

As for the future, I am cautiously optimistic.  This is clearly a very uncertain time.  In the short term we will probably be worse off.  Short term, in this context, is likely to be most, if not all of my remaining lifetime.  In the long term, however, I believe we will be better off.  We still neighbour Europe and will still trade heavily with Europe and will still work closely with many European countries on many things.  Not in the same way, but it will still happen.  We can build a new relationship:  One which I hope will be more fruitful and more productive because it will be based on honesty.  However, there is also a whole world out there that we are now freer to trade with and build relationships with as we choose.  Those choices belong to all of us, but first we need to understand and build bridges at home.