OK, so you're doubling down on it. I'm afraid that it says a great deal more about you than it does me, and what it says isn't savoury.
The vote that I cast in the booth in 2016 was both a moral and a legal one, legal because it was permitted within the EU Treaties, and within UK law, and moral because it is my firm belief that the limits of legitimate democracy lie within the boundaries of the nation state. I respect the views of those who believe that an element of democratic and sovereign power should be sacrificed for a pooling with other nations for the co-operative good, but in the case of the EU I don't happen to agree with those views. That is my absolute right, and it is yours to disagree with mine.
When we make a moral decision, we don't make it upon the outcome of that decision because we don't know what the outcome will be, we are consigning it to the future, where there are no certitudes, and many potential twists and turns and potential outcomes. We are effectively consigning it to moral luck, where our decision may, with the benefit of the hindsight that we didn't have at the time of the decision, turn out to have been the right one, or the wrong one.
Now you will jump to your keyboard and snarl back at me that the remain side did know, that you warned us time and again and that exactly the outcome of which you warned had materialised. This, of course, is patent nonsense. When I made my decision, which, despite my antipathy to the EU, was far from unconsidered, and not easy, I admit that the question of the Irish border had not taken the weight that it subsequently did, and that in retrospect it deserved. However, retrospect is a useful thing to have, and one not, by definition, available to us when we make a moral decision. An essential part of my business involves the movement of taxable goods across different tax jurisdictions within the EU, as well as that of dutiable goods into the EU, and I was used to a system that is based on the principles of well established and rapid technology, with relatively few physical checks, and which I saw as being fairly easily adaptable to the further requirements of the new order on the Irish, and indeed the Calais, borders. The question of SPS checks seemed an almost non-issue given that the UK, as a long established EU member, had at minimum identical standards as the EU, and very often exceeded them, and that anyway any checks deemed necessary could take place away from the border. The red lights only really started to flash when the EU made the commencement of trade talks incumbent upon a solution to the Irish border - which seemed entirely counterintuitive - and over the ensuing months and then years revealed that it had no intention whatsoever of agreeing to the use of electronic, trusted trader and off-border protocols whatsoever, as it used the Irish border in protracted, spiteful and vindictive attempts to in turn destroy Brexit altogether, or to use it to contain the UK within its regulatory orbit and under the cosh of the ECJ across a vast range of EU laws and regulations, in other words, hobbled.
EU insiders may have already set upon this strategy when the referendum result came in, but they certainly didn't let it on to you and I. The sheer, unbelievable lunacy of the EU's insistence upon first the backstop, and then the NIP, could not have been anticipated by even the most deranged onlooker in 2016. Sure, the Irish border was seen as a problem, but one that could surely be overcome with the application of diplomacy, balance, common sense and a shared objective of respecting the unique sensitivities of Ireland. Perhaps I am naive, but when I cast my vote I had no idea that it would be analogous to poking a sharp stick into a nest of vipers of a nature both utterly deranged, and yet possessed of some kind of genetic disorder that conferred upon them the dark, manipulative wisdom of Machiavelli's Prince.
My moral decision to vote to leave the EU does not render me an inciter of terrorist violence in NI, for nothing in even my wildest and most fevered nightmares could, in June 2016, have warned me, or anyone else outside the inner circle, that the EU would take the path that it did over NI, and that it rigidly, bound only by blind doctrine, continues to take. However, it is rather easier to make the argument, in the cold light of what we can all clearly see playing out, that the EU itself, in blindly insisting upon this maximalist lunacy, will have blood on its hands when the collision course of two ideologies, both deranged, reaches its point of impact.
It is up to you to decide whether the same can be said of the EU's cheerleaders, often united in their inability to see any virtue in the British government's stand, in Brexit itself, or any fault in the EU.
To the cheers of onlookers, and the tearful gratitude of its parents, many years ago you went into a burning building and came out carrying a small child. Last week that same child, now a man, was convicted for the rape and murder of two young schoolgirls.
Are you culpable for those murders? Are you, by extension, yourself a rapist and a murderer?
