Mary Killen Mary Killen

I was a Remainer – but I now want no deal

And not everyone is impressed by my Brexit U-turn

issue 21 September 2019

When I told two neighbours that I had become a no-deal Brexiter they physically recoiled from me.

‘You can’t.’

‘But there’s no other option,’ I said.

‘You can vote Lib Dem,’ they said.

‘But that’s the same as a second referendum. Even if the Lib Dems came to power, the ones who hadn’t voted for them would hate the ones who had.’

Until 2016 I wanted to leave the EU. My thinking was half-baked. There were the silly laws driving farmers mad, the judgments of the European courts and the fact that Brussels hadn’t signed off its accounts for years.

So when the chance came to vote to leave, I thought — good. But then I began to look into the consequences. I am biased towards Poles and didn’t want them to go home. I hadn’t realised that if they did go home, more non-EU immigrants would arrive to replace them so communities would still be disrupted.

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