When you’re a student, you sometimes believe yourself to be an expert in your field and feel the need to prove yourself every time the opportunity arises. That’s all well and good because you can make the choice about whether to speak up or not in each situation. The problem comes when other people expect you to be an expert in everything that could possibly be linked to your chosen field of study. I keep getting caught out with this when it comes to the likes of pub quizzes. A question on politics or philosophy comes up and it feels like every eye is on me. I must know the answer because I’m doing a degree in the subject. The problem is, most of the time, I’m just as clueless as anyone else because I have this inbuilt inability to recall any remotely useful information when I’m under pressure.
Luckily, most of the time, this panic-inducing moment is limited to either pub quizzes where everyone else panics over their own lack of recall or things on the news that only need a basic explanation. I even struggle in those situations as my poor mother and sister can attest to as I tried to explain how the votes were counted and transferred in the election last month. After half an hour of trying to explain, they thanked me for sharing my knowledge and we parted ways from the kitchen. I have a sneaking suspicion that they just left because I was getting too bogged down in the technical side and forgot to stick to the bare basics that they wanted to know. rather than because I’d imparted any kind of wisdom.
The problem now is that it’s happening again with this EU referendum. As a politics student, I should probably be really into it and by now have my decision made on how to vote. The reality is that I’m not and I don’t. As much as I try, I just can’t force myself to be interested and that’s despite knowing that the result from this referendum has the potential to massively change the shape of the world that I continue to live in.
I’ve never been a person to blindly follow what other people are doing and I have this stubborn streak that makes me want to do the complete opposite of what I’m told to do, especially if I don’t see a valid reason in it. All of the political parties have taken an official stance on the matter but they aren’t doing much more than simply announcing it. There’s really nothing coming from their press offices to persuade us that their opinion on the EU is the right one.
It’s totally different to what we became accustomed to in the May election. Back then we were all being bombarded with literature on why we should support each candidate and why each party was the right one to listen to. Every day we were seeing flashy campaigns on the television and most of them were pretty engaging. They grabbed the eye even if the mind didn’t agree with the message that was coming across. There were sound bites aplenty and points were communicated in a succinct way with some variety of evidence to back them up.
I think that a lot of the problem here stems from the campaigns that we’re seeing now in comparison to the party political ones that came before. Any I’ve seen have been boring and made up with too many words. The beauty of television is that you can paint a picture in silence and tell a story in an instant and it will stay with people if the message is strong enough but the campaigns on both sides seem to have neglected this fact. Instead we’re stuck with words being thrown at us from a disembodied voice and flashy graphics that actually seem to have very little substance.
There just seems to be such a major lack of momentum in this campaign. It pops up every so often but it comes across as something that can be brushed aside and there’s a real possibility that this is going to be reflected in polling day turnouts. I’ve been comparing this to the Scottish independence referendum from 2014. It was something that had nothing to do with us and yet we were all fully aware of the campaigns and could probably have placed ourselves on a side quite easily. There seemed to be more independent thought put into it with the facts laid out to allow individuals to consider them in their own time. It’s a far cry to what I’m seeing now.
We’ve had a few leaflets through the door but they don’t tell me much. I’ve tried so hard to read and digest them but there’s very little information actually contained within them. Instead of any independent thought being evident, it seems that each side is more focused on discrediting the other. I would love for someone out there to put together a third kind of leaflet. One that looks at both sides and presents the basic facts as they are without any swing or bias attached. One that understands that I am fully able to research and make up my own mind. One that understands that I am not a sheep that will blindly follow.
I think that the things that puts me off this referendum so much is the fact that all the claims seem to be baseless. Around town there are loads of posters promoting the leave campaign and they’re focused on how we could put millions into the NHS if we voted to leave the European Union. Nowhere have I seen any proof or guarantees that that cited £50million would in fact to go the NHS and not to further subsidies for politicians or tax breaks for high earners. The public trust in the government is not exactly high: you can’t just make a statement like that and expect it to be accepted. No-one I’ve spoken to believes that we’ll see a difference in the NHS if we are to leave and as such, the posters are becoming ironically counterproductive.
I’ll be going out to vote because I can’t bring myself to miss it, but this time around it feels more like a chore than something I actually want to do. I’m probably going to be a swing voter up to the point I put a cross on that ballot paper. I hold this belief that every person who goes out to vote should do so willingly and with the freedom to make an informed choice that is one that they’ve made themselves and so I need to make sure I fulfil that myself. At this point, I cannot help but think that it’s going to take a lot of research to get through to the facts, possibly taking more time and effort than some of my university work has taken.
If I choose to vote to stay, I want to be doing so for a reason other than sticking to what I know. I want to know exactly why it’s better and what benefits the EU membership provides me with. If I choose to leave, I want to know what I’m risking and how the protections that we get from the EU are going to be protected by the UK government. It looks like I’m in for a long two weeks of research.