What Brexit means to me

When I was a child, my grandparents lived in Pimlico, a working class area of London.?I'd take the train up to visit them.?My train stop was Vauxhall, obscure then, but well known today for the headquarters?of MI6?(Britain's CIA) and the New Covent Garden wholesale flower, fruit, and vegetable market.??My grandparents lived in a block of flats like this one. The "dancing children" brickwork is a memorial to the children killed in the WWII London bombing Blitz. They started evacuating kids from central London after that, which is why mum was brought up in Ewell with Auntie Bay.

Vauxhall?train station was built in 1848?with an?elevated track to reduce the number of homes that needed to be demolished to make room for the station and track.?You reach the eight station platforms up 4 steep staircases.?Tucked away under some?of these staircases?were?huge?empty?open-topped concrete?vats, each 20 feet across and 6 feet deep.?The tanks were installed at train stations and other places in the London Blitz, to hold water to?extinguish?fires set by Nazi bombers.???The Germans would schedule?night?bombing raids to coincide with low tide on the Thames, making it harder for fire fighters to reach water.?When hordes of German bombers came each night, the vats provided?London's Fire Brigade with local access to thousands of gallons of water.

Decades later, I travelled on business?to Stuttgart, West Germany (as it was then known).?To the men of RAF Bomber Command, plotting targets?in WWII, Stuttgart was called "Germany's Coventry" because of the Porsche, Mercedes, and other car factories there.?Both sides?were?bombing civilians targets?from May 1940, and the?whole?of Stuttgart?was a strategic target. The mention of MI6 above is relevant, as some nation states now fight out their ideologies in cyberspace instead of raining high explosives on each other’s heads. It's cheaper and has the same effect of bending other nations to your will, as we saw in both the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2016 US Presidential election.

Some Stuttgart colleagues took me out after work for a drink.?We sat?at an open air cafe across from a park with a pond.?The square-shaped?pond was clearly man-made, and I asked about it.?It was a feuersee or fire-lake, constructed in WWII, and?serving the same purpose as the?concrete vats at Vauxhall station.??I was severely jolted to realize how other communities rallied to reduce the effects of military attacks on civilians, just as we Londoners had. We had much more in common than divided us, starting with inadequate politicians and undemocratic processes.

One of Stuttgart's feuerseen from WWII. Communities in Britain and Germany had to build storage ponds to put out fires caused by wars. We did not have adequate political processes to resolve conflicts.

That was Europe 80 years ago, with countries isolated and picked off.?War was an early and easy resort, as it can be today, with Western politicians still trapping us in unending conflicts in?Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.?But politicians can no longer spark wars in Western Europe.?The European community provides a strong and superior forum for resolving political differences.?It is a huge mistake for Britain to leave this alliance because old people don't like "hearing unfamiliar accents" and resent?"being served by Eastern European retail staff".?The world has changed since the 1940s and?we need to gracefully accept?inevitable change, while moderating its effects.

Here is what large parts of London looked like in WWII. This is a number 88 bus (Clapham to Parliament Hill) that has fallen into a crater caused by a German bomb exploding in Balham tube station. This was an everyday sight in London in WWII.

Today, incompetent faux populist leaders?like the current?(2019) US President and UK Prime Minister, who have never known military service or war on civilians, stoke divisions among us.?They lie readily and freely to influence?voters.?They accept help from foreign propaganda.?About?half the British public still believe the false claim from the?Brexit?referendum that the UK sends ￡350m?a week to the EU, in spite of all attempts to debunk that lie.?Prime Minister Johnson's government has been noticeably silent about boosting the NHS with this mythical weekly ￡350m.?Trump has failed to deliver any of his 4 signature campaign promises (a border wall paid for by Mexico, a replacement for Obamacare that would be better and cheaper and cover all Americans, a tax cut for everyone, and "draining the swamp" (reducing corruption)).

Leaving our UK's most important and long lasting economic alliance is foolhardy in the extreme.?It makes it much harder to solve problems like climate change.?It leaves Britain alone and vulnerable, at a time when NATO is regularly bad-mouthed by an ignorant US President.?I think back to the days when communities had to artificially store water to put out fires started by neighbouring countries.?

My parents and grandparents told me those were not good days. Along with the financial, economic, and social wreckage, Brexit will return us to the days when disagreements were addressed with bombs, not diplomacy.???At the last minute of the eleventh hour, I call on Britain to remain in the E.U. and remain strong.

Peter van der Linden.