The moment we open our mouths, the moment we put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, we begin making decisions. Any utterance any human produces is bound up in a complex range of factors, both conscious and unconscious, personal and social. It occurs to me that the current debate over europe, as with all political debates, boils down to who one believes. The remain camp say x while the outers say y. If one sides cites a source of information, the other side respond with an accusation of bias. The inners point to what Obama says, and the outers accuse Obama as being biassed, part of a new world order and so on. One side says the EU is a rich man’s club which exploits people; remain says it protects people from exploitation. And then both accuse the other of working for those who want to exploit. Thus we reach the absurd point where both sides are using the same argument, saying they want to protect us from exploitation while saying the other side is biassed and just wants to stand up for those doing the exploiting. Given that there is no escaping bias, no way to establish an objective truth, the situation is becoming farcical.

As someone who sees no evidence for a new world order, I advocate staying in to protect people from unfettered capitalism. An outer might respond by saying that it is they who want to protect our rights by escaping a body they see as just as sinister. Then we both accuse one another of being biassed: they might accuse me of being influenced too heavily by the mainstream media, with it’s vested interest in maintaining the status quo and under government control; while I might accuse them of listening too much to people on the web, who essentially promote a right-wing, nationalist agenda, and play directly into the hands of those who would have us do away with all regulation in order to exploit us. It is a total mess of claim and counter claim, each accusing the other of basically the same thing. The stupid part is, we both come from the same, sceptical, rights-protecting position.