I feel your pain. I can see it in your
writing. You are right to grieve. You have lost something dear to you.
I just wonder if it helps for you to know
something of those that aren't grieving now. Would it in part alleviate some of
your sorrow, knowing that others are not suffering in the same way? Or
that, the reason for your grief and sorrow has given others a new lease of
life. A death can also be the portent of a new life, a resurrection. If
part of your healing is to hear of how this result has brought happiness and
joy to someone else and that this could be part of your healing, you might
enjoy reading this.
After I read your brilliant piece, I
spent a day riding my motorbike. The best place in the world I have found to
clear my thoughts and think afresh. You prompted me to look so much more deeply
at my own decision in this referendum and I, like you, saw the emotion that
this involved. We don't live in a logical paradigm. I am an emotional voter
too. There has hardly been a single factual piece of information with which
anyone could inform their decision. In the end you go with your gut, your
heart, your life experience and your expectations for the future. This is
why I decided to vote to leave.
Background; went to school in Holland for
several years (for a while Dutch was my first language), family lived in
Holland, Belgium, Germany and had a house for 40 years in France. My father
ended his day France and was buried there just before he was awarded an MBE for
his services to the community he served in that country. Julie and I have
hosted 250 students from around the world (50% Europeans) in the last 20 years.
My son went to University in Holland for a while. We have opened our house to
refugees and immigrants continually for the last 10 years. We had a family of 3
Afghan refugees live in our house for 9 months. In the last year we have had 2
homeless Romanian lads live with us, one of them shared our bedroom
as there was no other room in the house. We have 10 people currently living in
our house including a 92 year old, a Latvian migrant, and employee of Asda's,
a Scottish College lecturer and a law student from Kent University.
Here we go; let me tell you why I am
relieved, filled with hope and more joyful than at any time in the last
10 years.
However it happens, either quickly or as
a painful extraction, I will be relieved that we are finally pulling away from
an institution and a way of life dominated by un-paralleled bureaucratic
interference. A byword for any seemingly useless and irrelevant piece of
legislation has always been "oh that's the lot in Brussels telling us what
to do again". Although a lot of it was anecdotal and amusing (bent
bananas), it became part of the conversation never-the-less. You never heard anyone
defend it or come up with a reason that our lives would be improved by our
membership of the EU. Whether it was the case or not, few of us have fully
investigated the pros and cons of our membership for the last 40 years and most
of us were never in enough of an educated position to judge. Thus the EU failed
to take us with it, to these new heights of a social and legislative nirvana,
where the world is a better and fairer place. We were just left with a feeling
that they were interfering busy-bodies.
I am relieved that I might be further
away from France, whose shambolic bureaucracy prevents me from shutting down
our family bank account in Cannes because they have not had written
instructions from my dead mother. I don't want to be associated with a country
whose legal system is corrupt to the core and when we sold our house, even the
lawyers requested our fee payment in cash in order to cheat their own
government (they didn't get away with that - which is why it took another 6
months to complete the deal). Even to be in the same trading block as them
feels like an insult to me when the farmers and dock workers in that country
shut the country down at the slightest inclination that they might have to work
as hard as we do in the UK. A French doctor once told me that the
maximum working week legislation of 48 hours had them all rolling in the
aisles. Not a single person they knew had ever worked half that number of hours
in the last 20 years. I don't want to be in an organisation, working on a
supposedly level playing field where half the workers are enjoying full time
rates but only putting in half the hours. I have felt sad and ripped off
by the injustice of this for so long. Don't even start me on how Greece has
rewarded its workforce. Now I am relieved. I am no longer being
mugged.
This is my experience. These are my
personal examples of the emotional response I have made. Right or
wrong. It is what I know. What has happened to me.
I am relieved that my business might now
be protected by laws made in this country designed to serve the people of this
country. The operation of holiday rental homes (short term rental of property)
has always been considered a bona-fide business in this country. Like any other
business, it was subject to the rules of taxation that allowed it to compete
and prosper as any other business has done. This was not accepted by the EU,
whose other member countries did not permit this type of business to be
classified in this way. There was much talk of us having to abandon this tax structure
in the UK in order that we conform to the rest of Europe. For some
time, I was under the impression we would have to close our business. I felt
bad about that. What harm was I doing to anyone? Was this just another stupid
piece of the EU that I could do without? I think it was Tony Blair who stepped
in and saved our little industry back then but in recent years the prospect of
this impending legislation had reared its head again. Now we are leaving the
EU, I am so relieved, I can't tell you.
I know now that they won't close my
business down simply for the sake of conformity to some foreign dictat.
What a relief.
I am very relieved (the most relieved)
that we will pull away from allowing unlimited numbers of EU citizens
unfettered access to this country. The original countries were within my
knowledge and understanding. We have lived in most of them, understood their
ways, enjoyed their cuisines and different lifestyles and mostly shared their
values and morals. When the EU started to expand into countries we had never
been to, or in some cases never heard of, it all started to affect my business.
These were countries where the lifestyles and ways of
life were so different from ours that I couldn't grasp why we had asked them to
be part of our community. I don't know how much you know about the sex trade in
Canterbury but I am quite up to speed (no I am not a consumer!). Some of our
recently acquired Europeans have been setting up in this
City and enjoying an income of £5,000 per week selling the bodies of their
"girlfriends" who are servicing up to 10 men per night 7 days a week.
How do I know this? Because they have been using my properties and I have the
numbers and figures to show it. Yes there have been pop-up brothels (my made up
name for them) appearing within 100 metres of Canterbury West railway station.
It sickens me to the core. Who knows if these women are trafficked or held
against their will? My friends from the same European country as
these pimps, inform me that the girls could well be these gangsters
sisters that are being offered up. I don’t want them here. We would be so much
better off having some border controls that would hopefully weed out these
criminals from coming to our country.
Prostitution is the oldest game in the
world and no country is immune but this level of the monetisation of the human body is so alien to my
culture and way of life it sickens me to my stomach. I have to clean out the
used condoms, wash down the bathrooms used by the customers to wash the sex off
their bodies before they return to their wives and deal with thugs, the like of
which I have only ever seen in movies before. Frightening doesn't cover it. Yes
of course they represent only the very smallest percentage of
all European migrants to this country. They just happen to be the
ones I have come across. I don't have the right to tar them all with the same
brush but with no control on which of them enters this country, I have no
option but to vote to leave and to instigate some form in border controls. None
of them should have access to this country unless they can prove where and how
they are making their money or have bona fide employment. That's fair isn't it?
I have to prove every penny of expenses on what I earn. Their £5,000 per week
(multiplied by 100s of similar operations throughout the country - just
type "pop up brothel" into Google) is big bucks. Makes me mad as
hell to think about it. I am so relieved it may come to an end.
These types of "holiday home"
customer are a direct threat to my business. How do you think the neighbours
enjoy living next to my properties now? This didn't happen even 2 years ago.
Now it's common place. How am I supposed to vet who books my apartments? Excuse
me sir, are you setting up a pop-up brothel? Are your girls here on their own
volition? Can I put a line in my booking system apps that says; "no dogs,
no children and defo no pimps from Eastern Europe"? Can I do that? My life
is going to be much better off if these people are not given free travel passes
to come here and destroy my business. What a relief it is to me to think I
might be rid of this plague on me and my business.
(note: the operation of these
"pop-up brothels" is totally legal. All transactions and bookings are
done on line. There is no money taken at the house. I have no legal way of
preventing this sickening operation from happening right here in Canterbury, in
my houses - it would be me breaking the law if I tried. However, through
various means, I am now one step ahead of these guys, who now try to make
bookings calling themselves George Smith and the like. I still live in fear
of Bogdan turning up and threatening me. He wasn't pleased the last
time I turned him down. They have tried offering me double rates. It
will soon be threats to my person. The trouble is, they just move to the next
holiday home operator who doesn't mind the extra money).
The only means I have to fight them is to
vote leave.
I have also been responsible for closing
down a dangerous and highly illegal drug running operation right down town in
our City. It was run by the same "family" of men as the brothel
operators. Sitting in a £60,000 Range Rover in my street with 2 young
expendable lads running cocaine to the revellers in the local clubs. I
felt particularly piqued with the arrogance and audacity of this open air
operation from this RO registered vehicle. How dare you come here and do this and
stick a finger up to us at the same time. Not even trying to be discreet or
undercover. Detroying my neighbourhood and trying to ruin my business
by selling drugs outside one of my houses with your sickening disregard for our
lives or our lifestyle. And to sit there boasting of your gains and
advertising your origins. It was too much to bear. (note:I had them
run out of town. The police set up a surveillance operation and closed him down
- I'm guessing he's just moved to another town).
I don't want these guys in the country
and I'm relieved that in the not too distant future, there might be some controls that might even prevent one or two of these criminals coming
over here to harass me.
I have accommodated some of their fellow
countrymen in my house (even in an emergency in a bed in my bedroom) and they
have told me the same thing. Do not trust them. They would sell their own sister for a few pounds. I know that sentiment as a fact now. It is my experience. It is
actually what had happened to me and my business and my family. I'm not making
this up. They were selling women in the streets of Canterbury as if they were
slabs of meat laid out in the Goods Shed.
I am relieved that I may be able to
protect my children from this influx of people who have such different values
and life styles to ours, by voting for an exit to this madness. I sometimes
thought I would lose my mind it bothered me so. There are people in this
country who break the law. Thankfully, I have not met many of them in my
community, even though I spent a considerable time as a visitor to Wormwood
Scrubs. The ones I have met, I could work with. I could see who they were and
how they came to that place in their lives. I'm afraid I cannot see the same
things with this new threat. There are some men doing this stuff that are as
cold and dead in their hearts and minds as you will find anywhere in the world.
I have felt physically sick shaking their hands and holding their semen stained
money. Physically sick. I am so relieved that this might just be a thing of the
past.
I am relieved that maybe we will no
longer have to pay to educate people from Europe who don't reside in
our country. One Polish boy, who stayed with us for 3 years,
gleefully dropped his mobile phone in the bin as he left, in the full knowledge
that he would now never be traced by the Student Loan Company, as it was their
only point of contact with him. Off he went with his £35,000 worth of
debt courtesy of the UK taxpayer. Other children who have stayed with us came
here and enjoyed free top notch education at local grammar schools (surely some
of our local students missed out as a result?). These children were carefully
chosen by schools as they were triple grade A students and were
always mentioned in the school results. This of course keeps those schools at
the top of the educational leagues. This is a scam and another waste of
tax payers money. Why did we insist in giving all this
money away to European students? I felt mugged again. Now I can rejoice in the
knowledge that this little scam might come to an end.
There are others in our community in
Canterbury that have travelled from those regions that now live in
shanty towns behind the Wincheap industrial estate and the Asda
supermarket. I really thought I had seen it all in my travels through the
shanties of New Dehli, Cape Town and Nairobi but now we have small cities
of people living here as we might have done half a millennium ago. There are 6
or 7 poor people squeezed into a damp and cold rusting shipping container at the
end of our road. But we do nothing about it because we want someone else to
wash our cars. All of this is a result of the free movement of labour in
Europe. It's the nasty, real side of this experiment that I see. I have helped
men in the middle of winter living in tents right opposite the Langton
Boys school, who were so ill they couldn't move and who were in actual
danger of dying. They had no friends and no family by their sides. They came to
England to find a better life and it nearly killed them. Why do we allow this
to happen in our towns and cities. With no control of the numbers,
they keep rolling in, believing the hyperbole that the streets are paved with
gold. Our Porchlight charity and homeless shelters are buckling under the
strain of an imported and wholly preventable problem. I have spent evenings at
the church shelter with some of these guys who are the losers in this whole
European debacle. It is not a pretty sight. These poor unfortunate souls are
better off at home in their own communities and families. Let's end this
misery.
Finally, I am relieved that I don't have
to explain to Grandad why the country voted to stay in the EU in this
referendum. At 92 he still lives his D-Day plus one nightmare. Driving
over the dead bodies of his fellow countrymen to resupply the front line troops
who were being slaughtered by german bullets. He still finds it
impossible to allow a place in his heart for them or the continent that he
fought to free. It sounds illogical to the younger members of our communities
but we sit and eat together every night and I am frankly delighted that I don't
have to live with a person who feels that this vote, had it been to remain,
would have cast an acrid pall over his remaining days. For him, it was
quite literally "the Germans are going to win in the end" type of
scenario that was about to come true. The thought of all that blood and loss of
life, in his eyes, would have been for nowt. However irrelevant this might
be for 95% of the rest of the population and is illogical to us (given our
relationship with Germany now), Grandad still lives with it. And we still live
with him. He will not go to his grave with any regrets.
How would you expect me to vote?
I'm going to the pub to celebrate.
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