I probably had a weirder referendum week than you

Reflections on ten years of #Londependence.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, we dig more into plans to use AI to speed up the planning system, speaking to Faculty AI’s Paul Maltby, who is working on the Augmented Planning Decisions programme. Plus – does Wychavon even exist?! Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

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It’s ten years this week since I had one of the strangest few days of my life.

It was the early hours of the 24th June 2016, and David Dimbleby had just declared to the nation that the numbers were conclusive: Britain had voted to leave the European Union.

At the time, I was living in Crouch End, the leafy North London suburb that is not just a Remainer heartland, but almost a parody of smug, affluent liberalism. The day before the referendum, I had hung my EU flag out of my window. It was unfortunate, in retrospect, that this was the only thing I did to help the Remain campaign.

So unsurprisingly, I was devastated by the result. It was a gut-punch. The nation was rebutting all of the smug, liberal values I believed in – and still believe in today. And it was made worse knowing the uncertainty it would create for my partner, who is a Canadian and Dutch dual citizen, resident in Britain thanks to her EU passport.

So feeling powerless, I did the only thing that powerless people can do in times of distress. I started a petition.

Heading to Change.org, I hastily typed out a somewhat tongue-in-cheek cry of despair:

London is an international city, and we want to remain at the heart of Europe.

Let’s face it - the rest of the country disagrees. So rather than passive aggressively vote against each other at every election, let’s make the divorce official and move in with our friends on the continent.

This petition is calling on Mayor Sadiq Khan to declare London independent, and apply to join the EU - including membership of the Schengen Zone (Umm, we’ll talk about the Euro...).

Mayor Sadiq, wouldn’t you prefer to be President Sadiq? Make it happen!

#londependence

I posted the link to Twitter and Facebook, and promptly forgot about it as I continued to scroll through the morose Remainers on my Twitter timeline, collectively trying to make sense of the darkness that was descending on our politics.

Then just as I was about to, finally, go to bed, I remembered the petition and checked to see if anyone had signed. I couldn’t believe my tired eyes. It had somehow accrued over 1,000 virtual signatures in a matter of minutes.

My jaw dropped, and I continued to refresh as the sun began to peek over the horizon. The numbers continued rising… 1,500…. 2,000…. 4,000… 10,000. The petition was starting to snowball.

It appears that half-asleep and not entirely sincerely, I had accidentally sparked a new secessionist movement.