Of course you're for Remain, said my old friend and colleague Michael Smith at Facebook. "Your wife is French and you live in France." Or words to that effect.
I take the "of course" as being the most pertinent part of his comment, though Mick is also for staying. Marriage and a shared life between London and the Var may have an effect, especially a subconscious one, but I reached my decision easily without thinking of either.
My vote was cast by post during a 10-day visit home to the UK this month. It was done without reference to domestic detail and also without taking account of the despicable killing of the Labour MP Jo Cox. I simply believed, as I still do, that we should remain in the EU, all those significant warts and all, because we are better in than out.
Within, we can influence policy on a world stage more than would be possible as a post-imperial island state detached from any kind of bloc except an uneven alliance with the United States. The EU is active way beyond its frontiers. We need to be part of that, even as we strive to change the community from the inside.
There are benefits as well as a price to paid from EU membership. Amid all the grotesque tit-for-tat rhetoric on the economy and other relevant issues, I see immigration as the one area where withdrawal might just have a desired effect. But the difference, I suspect, would be so slight as to make it an unwise single issue on which to part company with our 27 fellow member states.
No one following the debate, if not a highly qualified economist, is likely to have a clear idea of what the future would really hold if we left. We rely on our instincts and experience of life. I fear so drastic a change, the possible impact of that change on the pound and employment and the need for protracted negotiations on alternative trade deals. I believe Britain's human rights record would become more dubious in the absence of European safeguards.
And on Jo Cox, I would say only this: had I been a waverer, as opposed to committed to Remain (despite the appalling quality of its presentation of the issues), her utterly senseless killing might indeed have made a difference. Although there are Leave supporters I know and like or respect, I was already inclined to loathe the campaign for withdrawal because of other kinds of people who also want the UK to go it alone.
I see people with whom I disagree in Remain. I see no dark forces, no rotten pro-EU equivalent to a Farage or Galloway. And no one has committed violence in the name of Remain.
If the one positive consequence of Jo Cox's murder happened to encourage people to vote to stay in sufficient numbers, I would take that as some form of consolation for the waste of a precious life (though I would naturally have preferred her to live and the vote to have gone the wrong way).
Yet my view is worth no more than yours or the next man or woman's.
Please vote whatever your inclination. That is what democracy is or should be about.
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