One of my father’s many double-edged legacies is a political passion I can no more hide than I could hide my thin Binnie locks and burn-tastic Scottish skin. It’s one of the many reasons we did so little talking in later years: the importance of raising a child with strong political beliefs backfired when my politics leant further and further left, the distance growing annually from his own deep blue.
I woke yesterday morning to find two messages on my phone: an email from my friend in Canada with a link to their Immigration procedures, and a shocked text from my immigrant mother, furious with the Leave voters who, in her words, ‘are still craving the days of a poisonous, destructive Empire that is long since dead, thank goodness.’ I love those people, and my furious mother-in-law, my tearful, shocked friends, my twitter pals enraged and joking, all of us looking for a hand to hold in this fucking baffling disaster movie.
At the bar last night over many consolatory cocktails, three of us swore and sighed and held our hands up in loss. We pored through the Facebook posts of righteously indignant friends of friends lamenting the vitriol, the abuse, the unkind language directed at Leave voters. Isn’t this a democracy? they say. Do I not have a right to vote the way I wish?
Good news, guys! You do! That’s why you could freely walk into the voting booth with your pencil and vote exactly the way you wanted, with no coercion, no police brutality, no one keeping you from the polling station, no one burning your ballot box! But it also means that I’m allowed to think less of you for voting Leave, or for not supporting Remain because you ‘just didn’t know which side to believe’. That’s my right.
My husband used to have a long-running debate with me. Do you think you’ll ever be able to separate a person from their politics? he would say. And I would say: I can separate a person from their loving or loathing of mushrooms, or of Mad Max: Fury Road, or of holidaying in Spain. These things do not contain a moral dimension. But if a person denies a woman rights over her own body; if a person denies rights to gay and trans people; if a person votes to maintain a government which penalises the poorest, which refuses to increase tax on the highest earners, which maintains secret courts and hidden trials, which systematically attempts to privatise the NHS; when a person talks only of their family, their home, their town, and cannot conceive of a world which is improved by understanding that we don’t live in a bubble, but in a series of deeply interconnected trades and experiences, that, for want of a better word, we’ll call ‘society’; if the way they vote indicates selfishness, and ignorance, and intolerance, and an inability to differentiate between headlines in right-wing newspapers and expert opinion expressed by, say, Unison, the head of the NHS, the governor of the Bank of England, Greenpeace, the leaders of every single major UK political party, the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Women’s Rights groups, LGBTQ groups, and David motherfucking Attenborough – then yeah. I can’t separate a person from their politics. And I’m ok with that.
I’m sorry that you’ve already found yourself on the wrong side of history. But I’m not going to play my tiny violin when people call you out for failing to support tolerance, togetherness, and gratitude for the multitudes you already have.