Thread by @atatimelikethis

I was inspired by the marches in the US and UK. They look like the Civil Rights Movement and that reminded me. There is evil in the world but fighting one form of hate with another version of the same hate isn't the answer.

This will be a thread about hope for our country.

In the 1960s. Martin Luther King had every reason to hate. He'd been discriminated against, beaten, and segregated from society. Yet he built his civil rights movement on hope for the future. He had a dream that all people were equal.

A men who spent his entire life locked up in jail, beaten and tortured by his captors, had every reason to hate them. Yet Nelson Mandela chose a path of peace and reconciliation.

Two men who'd witnessed atrocities against each of their communities, bombs killing the other. Murder. Torture. Yet Paisley and McGinness chose to become friends rather than let a bloody war rage on for another 100 years.

The politics of hate will always to appealing, with their seductive siren call of easy to blame groups and quick solutions full of revenge. These stories of hate for the other smash the ship of society into the rocks, and create wounds that never heal.

Like a fast food diet, the politics of hate is immediate and satisfying, available as soon as the urge takes us, it can be consumed quickly. Yet all the time, in its subtle addiction, it's adding to weight and clogging up arteries.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Ian Duncan Smith. They're treading a well worn path. Hatred of immigrants, of Muslims, a path as old as hate itself.

But those in New Old Labour are no different. Instead of encouraging progress they wish us to believe those who create wealth are all leaches. That old well trodden path leads to authoritarianism and stagnation, repackaged up and sold like nectar to a frustrated populace.

The sad truth is both need each other like a coin needs heads and tails. Without an opposite to rally against and fire up the troops both are simply extremists broadcasting their own version of hate.

Which leads to the bitter irony of them working together, hand in hand to take us out of the clutches of the EU, not because its in our interest, but because they both see it standing in the way of their vision of controlling you.

But it doesn't need to be this way. Remember Nelson Mandela? Martin Luther King? Paisley and McGinness? Hope does not need to be banished by hate.

We have to be #woke to face up to the world we live in and find solutions to our problems. It is children who stamp their feet and blame those around them for their failures. It should be adults who find a way to build.
Yet in our world this is strangely reversed.

The solution to our trading problems is never to throw mud in the face of our neighbours, to reject those closest to us to chase a fiction. It's to work with them to build a stronger better world.

Those who bring skills, experience and investment, or simply ask for asylum, are not to be feared. They are to be embraced to help us build a successful society. We should thank them for coming and bless our luck to have them.

The successful are not to be envied, they're to be emulated and encouraged to share the benefits of success with those who've helped them along the path.

They're not leaches, they're athletes to inspire us.

The answer to poverty is not to keep people locked up in  handouts, it's to free them from those chains and help them progress. Through education, support and sometimes even relocation. That is the benefit of freedom of movement and it applies to our uneconomic areas too.

So be awake.

Learn to recognise the politics of hate. And every time you hear someone telling you the problems of the world are due to someone else, you'll know you've hearing carefully crafted hare. Think instead about the politics of hope. What can we do together not apart.

Because no one ever built a world by tearing it down. Noone created a child by destroying another. Our solutions exist, but like those fashionable snowflakes, they all easily melt in the fire of hate.

Being apart is so much easier than being together.

So now we know the EU referendum was corrupted by off the books social media manipulation and illegal unreported spend.

That could easily be a chance for more war and hate. But that's the old politics.

Instead now we have a chance to build

Our job is not to look at Leavers and say, "you lost get over it". As satisfying as that would be, it resolves nothing.

Instead it's a chance to build. Look at where we are in the world, at our size, at our proximity to neighbours and friends. Why would we reject that?

This is our chance for a new settlement. Our chance to use our place at the top table for good. Our chance to listen to the voices who have not had chances in this world. And the voices who fear working with our friends.

This is our chance to create not union but confederation.

The EU can be a force for good and it can meet the needs of our nation.

It is not a super state to hate. It is a confederation of equal states we can lead in the direction we need.

And it won't be as difficult to do as fighting against ourselves.

If we choose hope over hate.

A quick update. Mr Matthew Parris making some quote similar points.