Dear Angus

Dear Angus,

In response to your article this morning about how older people find change difficult, yes, sadly, the mere mention of the word ‘change’ makes some people feel uneasy, especially the over-50s. We all like the familiar and don’t want to be moved out of our comfort zones. We don’t want to be forced into making decisions that we don’t feel equipped to make. We are all after certainty and composure, but what we forget is that the nature of life itself is change! And the biggest changes we have to make are within ourselves.

When it comes to big changes, being in denial, as long as it’s not a permanent state, is not necessarily a bad thing and may be a necessary phase of the journey to something new. When we face any change in life that’s uninvited and threatening, denial is often the first phase of the process of dealing with it. It helps us to get used to an idea gradually without being overwhelmed by the chaos of it.

I agree with you that we shouldn’t give up on the older generation. I believe that some may just be taking longer to come to the decision that independence will be a genuine force for the good in Scotland. After all, not all caterpillars yield to the cocoon at the same rate. When the moment to spin the chrysalis arrives, some of them actually resist and cling to their larval life. They put off entering the cocoon to the following Spring, postponing their transformation for a year or so. This state of clinging is called the diapause, and maybe it’s where a lot of older people are finding themselves as we speak.

Ironically though, some of those who found it difficult to vote for the uncertainty of an independent Scotland, might have been quite happy to fall for the xenophobic Brexit line of ‘taking their country back’ – a deliberate tactic used by the Leave campaign to appeal to older, less flexible people.  They knew full well that the millions who believe the tabloids – who have been deliberately fed anti–EU rhetoric for decades – would only be too keen to return to the myth of the good old days, where we did things without ‘Johnny Foreigner’ and things were so much better.

By now they will know how badly they were duped.

The falling pound – at an all time low- may be good news for the likes of HBSC and GlaxoSmithKline, who love volatile markets and are all seeing nice boosts to their share prices, but what about normal families and pensioners? Very soon the weekly shopping bill is likely to be much more expensive due to the increasing costs of imports, as will high street prices. The more the pound depreciates the bigger impact on families.

The Great-British-Bus-Lie, which promised 350 million a week to the NHS was just a ‘mistake’ as Farage said the day after the referendum. No extra money will be going the way of the NHS. In fact many now believe Brexit, with its right-wing power grab will leave the NHS more vulnerable to privatisation than ever before.

I wonder how many of them know that the Conservative Party clearly stated in their manifesto that staying in the single market was a priority?  I wonder how many of them know, despite the relentless lies by right wing tabloids, how very well we have done out of Europe and that since the formation of the EU, Britain has had the highest cumulative growth of any country in the EU – 62 % – compared with Germany at 35%?

I wonder how many of them know how much our financial services depend on operating freely in the EU and how the UK benefits from exporting tariff-free to every EU country? And that this is now in real jeopardy.

I wonder how many of them knew how little control we would actually have over immigration? When Theresa May was asked by Andrew Neil the other day if it would be significantly lower after Brexit, she couldn’t give him a straight answer, because, as she well knows, reducing immigration comes at a real cost to Britain and it’s one we can’t afford. Like it or not, we don’t produce enough people in the UK to care for our elderly population. If you reduce the numbers to tens of thousands, as she claims to want to do, it means lots of women will have to give up their jobs to look after elderly relatives.

I wonder how many of them knew that voting for Brexit would undo all the incredible good done in the last 40 years of European co-operation such as manufacturing, financial agreements, scientific partnerships, cultural and educational exchanges, scholarships and grants.

I wonder how many would have voted to leave if they actually had known that they were voting for the great Repeal Bill – in other words giving the extreme right wing carte blanche to decide the future of the UK undemocratically, without recourse to parliament?

How many who voted out of Europe in Scotland understand what we are set to lose in funding and grants from the EU? Key university funding will dry up. The European Investment bank which helped fund roads railways and hospitals is under threat of being withdrawn. Scottish councils are poised to lose 46 million pounds a year after Brexit. That money will not come our way from Westminster after Brexit.

When people were asked to vote in the EU referendum, they weren’t asked what they wanted to get into, but only what they wanted to get out of. It was a campaign fought on misinformation and deliberate skewing of facts by a leave campaign that actively misled the public and fuelled irrational fears. Those of us who voted to remain did so not based on a plan set out by the Brexiters because there wasn’t one. We voted with our guts to remain because the Remain arguments were by and large evidence based and rational and because we had a good idea of the value added to the UK by the EU.

Thank Goodness we still have time in Scotland to come to our senses. We have another chance at a fairer society. We have a chance to rid ourselves of the worst excesses of neoliberalism that have dogged us for the last 30/40 years – the narcissism, entitlement, tax evasion, corruption in high places, unequal division of resources; in short, the political ideology that has continually put markets and money before people.  We need governance that is able to address the real issues of the 21^st century, not some isolationist imperialist backwards empire which only works for the rich.

We need a society that works on the principle of “I – thou” mutuality; one that works for the many and not for the few and one that minimises wealth inequality. I sincerely hope those over sixties who fought the inevitable last time will be able to change their minds for the sake of our collective future in Scotland and help to make Scotland the kind of outward looking, progressive, fairer, more inclusive and more equal country that our children and grandchildren can be proud of in the 21^st century.

Grace S