DRAMATIC RESULTS TO PN REVIEW EU REFERENDUM SURVEY
**87% VOTE TO REMAIN IN THE EU**
Poets are […] the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; […] the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. - Shelley, A Defence of Poetry 1821
In nine days’ time Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ will be voting in a ratio of 6.5 to 1 to stay in the European Union. The bi-monthly literary magazine PN Review canvassed writers and readers to establish where this constituency stands on Europe.
Intending to vote?
• Almost 300 responses received
• 109 from poets
• 40 from other writers
• The balance from readers, teachers and other literary folk
• 94 % are intending to vote
Voting intentions?
• 12.9% (36) Leave
• 87% (243) Remain
• 2.8% (7) changed voting intentions during the period of debate
Reasons?
Apart from the familiar economic arguments, cultural reasons include:
Leave?
• ‘the vile treatment of Greece’ by the EU
• Shakespeare (John of Gaunt’s speech from Richard II)
• ‘a brutally complex, culturally degrading system of usury’ (echoes of Ezra Pound)
• a desire to re-establish connections with the Commonwealth with whom ‘we have more in common culturally’
• Little emphasis on immigration, more insistence on sovereignty
Remain?
• disadvantage to coming generations of restricting movement and opportunity
• positive desire, given ‘our good fortune’, to ‘share not grab back’
• ‘kindness and common sense’
• concern that UK withdrawal would catalyse the unravelling of the EU at large, with incalculable consequences;
• British cultural debts to Europe (‘writers are at their best in extensive cultural and linguistic environments’)
• ‘The period when Britain was last culturally divorced from Europe used to be called the Dark Ages…’
• ‘Remain’ comments come back to ‘sharing’, ‘giving’, making common cause in terms of protecting environment, enhancing culture, fluidity of movement
• Little sense of a threat to ‘our culture’ (on the contrary, that culture is secure and enrichable) and little fear of immigration
Novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici gave the following statement in favour of Remain:
‘I have always thought of myself as a European with roots in the Middle East who happens to live in Britain. I spent my working life teaching literature in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex, where I was proud to have as colleagues not one but two people who had been imprisoned first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets. I was naturally delighted when Britain finally joined the EU and the thought that it might now break with it fills me with gloom. The idea that by remaining in the EU Britain somehow loses its uniqueness is laughable. France is just as proud as England of its heritage and traditions yet the only people wanting to leave are the Front National. This country, which seems split between those whose only ambition is to make money and those who dread and fear foreigners, is not the one I came to in 1956. Is this how the Jews felt in the waning years of the Weimar Republic, I ask myself?’
Digest of survey:
• Number of Respondents: 287
• Gender: 34.4% (99) female; 63% (181) male
• Age range: 25-54 28.3% (78); 55-64 27.8% (80); over 65 37.2% (107)
• Intending to vote: 94% (268); intending not to vote 5.6% (16)
• Voting intentions: Leave 12.9% (36); Remain 87% (243)
• Changed intention during campaign: 2.8% (8)
Click here to view the full survey results
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