If you care so much, why didn’t you campaign?

/ / 4 comments

sheila

I can’t help but notice the most bitter and upset people filling my Twitter & Facebook feeds about the result of this week’s referendum were not out campaigning.

They didn’t spend weeks canvassing, delivering leaflets and manning street stalls. On Thursday, they were not doing dawn raids, telling at polling stations, or knocking up pledges.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. Obviously, there were people out campaigning for Remain – many of them I know personally. To those people who fought hard and lost: you have my sympathy and respect.

But these other people. These people who are declaiming the end of the world as we know it, with black clouds of misery settling on them, but who did not lift a finger to persuade those undecided voters outside of their own Facebook friends? These people I do not understand.

If this result – this result that I am so pleased about – is such a terrible, ruinous thing for our country, why didn’t you do anything about it?

Members of the CfL team have spent weeks canvassing voters and persuading undecided people. On Thursday, some were up at 5am for ‘dawn raids’. Others, myself included, were positioned at polling stations from 7am for a spot of telling. And yet more spent at least a portion of the day knocking on doors to get out the vote.

Lack of experience is no excuse. We’re all new campaigners at the beginning. And the most striking thing about my local Vote Leave campaign was the number of people who had never done any campaigning before in their lives – but who felt so strongly about this vote that they could not possibly stay at home.

If you care so much, where were you?

When things really matter to me, I get up off my bum and do something about them. I don’t just watch the thing I don’t like happening and then cry about it once it’s done.

If the country had voted Remain, and I hadn’t bothered to campaign, I would have felt so much guilt and personal responsibility, knowing that my effort could have made a difference.

Instead of blaming ‘racists and xenophobes’, perhaps you should blame yourself.

As I have said before, this is OUR democracy. And when you delegate it to other people, things you don’t like will happen.

These pictures of Vote Leave campaigners are from across the country and across party divides. They worked hard to identify and persuade Leave voters, and then to get them out on Thursday. If you are one of the people decrying the result of the referendum who did no campaigning, you should learn from them.