By Jeremy Menadue
This is a short personal account of the Cornwall for Europe street stalls, so what follows will contain little moments that meant something to me and I hope the many friends made.
First contact – week before the referendum and the Remain campaign was directly outside the Truro Library. Just as I stopped to support them, I was handed a solid wood sign and spent the next hour trying not to drop it. What struck me was how many men stopped not just to shout but swear at their MP and the Remain activists – it was irrational.
Day of the vote – there were several incidents at the polling stations but surely what we later knew as “the shouties” couldn’t have won.
Soon after the catastrophic result there was a European solidarity gathering on Lemon Quay and all over the country people like me joined the 48% Facebook group, but our beloved Cornwall for Europe wasn’t formed until 2017.
One of the first decisions in August 2017 when the first stall was held in Truro was what to call the dot charts, eventually someone came up with Brexitometer.
At first there was a lot of hostility from the Leave voters
“Do you know what democracy is?” ” Well, we need to go back to ancient Athens and take it from there…”
“Are we going to have a referendum every week?”
At first you had to be reasonably clued up, with all the Brexit lies, failed economic projections but after a while what you needed was empathy and at least a little common ground with people who had been misled, swayed by false patriotism and the understandable urge to kick the PM in a Bishop Brennan fashion.
Local knowledge is a big deal – in Penryn, we set up near the old bank building and a venerable lady told us how wrong we were so I told her my grandfather used to be the manager and she remembered him from the 1960s and changed her mind very slightly.
Sometimes you remember the arguments because they were so absurd then you found out why. Falmouth and a fierce opponent of bullfighting told us the EU subsidised Spanish farmers raising bulls for the ring. Seemed crazy but it had been used in targeted Facebook advertising.
The never-ending idea that the EU is undemocratic despite the European Parliament..
But there were many uplifting, often comic days:
Liskeard – we were moved from a stall in the main street because it was a Lions club charity day to a quiet back street which just happened to be a busy shortcut to the supermarkets with a superb mural behind us. A wonderful couple I will call the Whiteadders stopped, the lady harangued the stall crew while her husband waited patiently and talked to me about other things entirely. Eventually his wife claimed victory but before he was whisked away, he whispered in my ear “I’ll tell you a secret, I voted Remain!”
St. Austell – other end of the street from Double’s constituency office we shared a slightly covered entrance with Jehovah’s Witnesses and when the wind got up we had to catch the leaflets flying around and check which was which – there was a bad busker on the other side of the street, he drove so many people our way. Unlike the amazing saxophonist in Falmouth we wanted as near as possible.
Hayle – opposite the train station and someone squaring up to Rod, no chance against two degrees and a judo black belt!
St. Ives – Howard was having trouble with a binary question guy, essentially they ask a question then say loudly “right or wrong?” If you say right you lose ground and if you say wrong the temperature rises. So I suggested politely I liked questions with at least three answers and he was off with a curse.
We had a Big Red Bus too but no lies on it – the street stalls where it turned up were a joy but made you think maybe Remain should have tried this sort of thing in 2016.
Final memory – on one of the very first stalls someone was shyly waiting until we’re packing up then saying she didn’t realise we could do anything about Brexit. Well hundreds (thousands?) of street stalls later Brexit is still in the news and heading slowly but surely to the bin.
Now I’ve gone back over these memories something jumps out. The real qualitative difference between what we were doing and the Leave campaigns. We were trying to make sense of a ridiculous situation and giving hope of putting some of it right one day. Leave was propaganda without any consideration of the people they conned, their main website was shut down just after the vote. We will never see a Leave street stall!
It’s not for me to thank people for helping but I’ll try to mention some of those I stood alongside:
Howard, Bev, Dave, Gren, Chris, Emm, Mike and Sue, Tom, Howard H, Sue M, Rosemary, Jessica and many others. During lockdown I even missed the shouties.
