Two old men, two visions of Europe

The Daily Mail published a story this week about a World War Two navy veteran who cast a postal vote in favour of Brexit the day before he died. His family were reported as saying that he had “fought for his country until the end”.

Yesterday I spoke to a friend whose father also took part in the Second World War, much of it in a special forces unit behind enemy lines. My friend told me his father said he would vote Remain because he had fought for a free and peaceful Europe.

Let us consider the thought processes of these two old warriors. The first seems to have got it into his mind, possibly encouraged by Boris “Winston” Johnson, that the European Union represents an existential threat to the British way of life. We fought them in the beaches; now we shall fight them in the polling booths.

The second old timer, still possessed of sufficient memory to visualise Europe as it was between 1939 and 1945, takes the view that 70 years of peace on the continent was a dream which he would have struggled to imagine back then, which nevertheless came true and which is worth a vote at the end of his life to preserve. He understands that not only do Europeans resolve their differences today with arguments and not armaments, as Gordon Brown reminds us, but that between them they have achieved levels of prosperity which, again, he would have found impossible to imagine when the Second World War came to an end.

My friend’s dad, a widower, recently moved from England to Madrid, where he will live out his remaining days at his son’s home with free access, while he remains a citizen of the EU, to Spain’s fine public health service. He may have cause to reflect while there that the fundamental democratic values for which he once risked his life are shared with equal enthusiasm and pride by the Spanish, the French, the Germans and the other EU nations. There may be differences over the size and shape of cucumbers and interpretations of the finer points of labour law but on the essentials of free speech, free elections, the free market and equal justice for all the unanimity is absolute.

The old special forces soldier sees a united and stable Europe as a good result. The late Navy man chose to see a united and stable Europe in a light not dissimilar to the “monstrous tyranny” Churchill described in his blood, toil, tears and sweat speech in 1940. It is on the contrasting visions of these two ancient Brits that the result of the referendum will turn.