Aileen Quinton: I'm rejecting Project Fear and embracing Project Confidence

If we leave the EU, terrorism will run amok unchecked throughout Europe.

This is will apparently be down to our inability to share vital security intelligence post Brexit.

Why would that be? Why would leaving the EU mean we stop managing intelligence? Indeed if our security has to depend exclusively on cooperation between other EU countries, we are sunk anyway unless the US sneaked into the EU when I wasn’t looking.

Post Brexit, if those responsible for such matters don’t feel up to the job of coordinating security requirements, including cooperation with other countries, both inside the EU and out, I hope they can step aside and let someone more confident and competent get on with it.

That principle also holds for government. If you aren’t up to the job of governing an independent UK then maybe you should consider spending more time with your family.

We have had Blair and Major on a visit to Northern Ireland spreading more, well let’s call it “gloom”. Peace is threatened apparently. How so? True peace and true reconciliation does not have fear at its roots. Fear is both a weapon and goal of terrorism not of peace.

Interesting that Blair has time for this but doesn’t appear to have any to appear in front of the Northern Ireland Select Committee to answer questions about his role in the murky business of British victims of Gaddafi, and his IRA allies, being frozen out of compensation.

On the subject of whose side he is on regarding terrorism, it is not something I would want to be betting on.

Have the WMD turned up yet? Then we have Major who said that negotiating with the IRA would turn his stomach, as he was negotiating with the IRA.

Oh and remind me about how his venture with us and the ERM went?

The IRA have already impacted upon my life enough through the murder of my mother in the Poppy Day Massacre in Enniskillen in 1987. They took my mother. I’ll be damned if they are getting my vote too.

I was too young to vote in the first referendum but I remember my mother’s verdict on what was sold then as merely a trading group, “this is a slap in the face for The Commonwealth”.

She, like my father served in the RAF during WWII and she would have had memories of camaraderie of The Commonwealth family during that time.

This lair and Major also warned us that the Union itself is at stake. If the UK has a future as a united country it has to advance in confidence not in fear. If we are so unsure of ourselves and the unity of our country that we are afraid to act in its interests we will end up with a Union not worth defending.

A locked down border is another fear factor. Again why would this be?

We didn’t have onerous restrictions pre EU. In fact the most draconian arrangements I can remember were during the foot and mouth emergency, when we were both in the EU. Pre EU, I just remember cursory checks of driving licenses or getting waved through by a man in the customs hut who didn’t even leave his seat.

One of my uncles used to comment “Well that’s the job I’d love”.

Even in the worst of the terrorism the border was easy, indeed too easy, to cross. What arrangements we make with the RoI will be a matter of negotiation and to mutual benefit in order to manage large scale smuggling and control of immigration. No need to fear.

The people of the United Kingdom deserve better than the scare stories. The Union deserves better. Lets go for better.

I will be voting to leave the EU, so that the UK can get back control ceded over many aspects of life.

I’m rejecting Project Fear and embracing Project Confidence.

Confidence – in ourselves, in our country and in the Union.