One year ago my nation, the UK, voted by a narrow margin to leave the EU. I steadfastly maintain that almost no-one knew what they were voting for, what the question meant, or even what the questions really was. The Remain campaign completely failed to articulate any of the great many good reasons for remaining a part of the EU, while the Leave campaign treated the nation to a feast of lies and false promises, and knowingly manipulated and encouraged a level of anti-immigrant feeling that is, in some people, hard to distinguish from plain existential fear, hatred of the other, a loathing for change, or plain and simple racism.

On the morning of the vote, I wrote the following passage. I wish its basic message had been more widely felt by my countrymen and women.

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One last point, then I’ll stop (I promise!).

Apologies for the long post, but just in case anyone I know is still wavering and would like more food for thought, here’s why I dearly hope you will vote #remain today.

The Leave campaign have been continually telling everyone the EU is ‘undemocratic’, and that voting Leave would be ‘good for our democracy’.

It’s a serious point, and deserves a serious answer, because it’s also wrong. Why? Because it uses as its foundation an extraordinarily narrow, small-minded and unhistorical conception of what the word ‘democracy’ actually means.

Democracy is not only about walking into a polling station and voting for a political representative, though that is, of course, a vital part of it. Democracy is a great deal more: it is all those things for which the act of voting stands as a symbol and a metaphor. It is a way of thinking, a basic cultural and moral value that declares in principle the rights and the integrity of each individual, and the belief in the right of every individual to be an active participant in his or her society – not as a subject or a slave but as a fully active and responsible free citizen.

Which is to say – democracy is a way of thinking, a way of living. Which means it is also the books, poems and plays we write and read; the songs we compose and sing, the things that make us laugh; our capacity to question and challenge and satirise and mock; our ability to do science and discover ever more incredible things about our universe, precisely because we have developed a way of thinking and living that is not based on absolute certainties, but rather on probabilities and argument and evidence, and the perpetual openness to new generations coming along and ‘democratically’ updating and improving (and sometimes revolutionising or jettisoning) the knowledge that we once took for granted.

In this context, two important truths become striking:

The first is that the European Union is first and foremost a conglomeration of democratic states – countries whose common values are very precisely the values of democracy, free enquiry and free expression – an international organisation created directly as a response and an antidote to centuries of terrible war, and to the totalitarian evils of the 20th century that literally ravaged our continent, including Britain.

Which means: the European Union, for all its functional faults, is culturally, politically and morally one of the world’s great DEFENDERS of democracy. So when Boris Johnson tries to outdo himself for repugnance by claiming the E.U. is secretly attempting to finish the work of the Nazis (about which the kindest thing one can say is that you can be sure he doesn’t really believe it, the slimy opportunist), we really must rise above the nonsense and realise that in the widest and most important sense, the Leave campaign has got it very precisely the wrong way round.

The second is that, yes, democracy is indeed going to face some huge challenges and threats in the next few years and decades.

From where do these threats come? From the seething cauldron of sectarian religious violence that is today’s Middle East, for one, (and the terrorism it will increasingly export); a recrudescence of a quasi-Tsarist Russia with expansionist imperial ambitions for another. And a new global hegemonic superpower – China – with increasing control over Africa and no history of democratic institutions and values, for a third. All these challenges will be better faced by a strong European Union.

So yes, there are threats to democracy in this world. Europe is categorically not one of them.

In the end, a strong Europe will in fact be one of the last bastions of democracy. And a mortally weakened Europe just could, in the end, many years from now, be the very thing that fails to prevent democracy’s collapse. That’s why all the UK’s prominent and respected historians are voting Remain.

So today, when the Leave campaign tell you that voting Leave is ‘the democratic thing to do’, just nod and smile. And know in your heart that the exact opposite is the case.

Then go and vote remain.

#remain