visit www.virtualnotdistant.com Hello and welcome to this extra episode of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, I’m Pilar Orti. If you’re a regular listener and managed to listen to last week’s episode, you might know that I was not going to release an episode this week, as I needed to catch up with myself and also, I’m in Madrid at the moment, where my set up is not ideal for working and also, not great for recording, so excuse the audio quality of this impromptu podcast. So today it’s Monday and I never release an episode on Mondays and this week I wasn’t suppose to release any anyway. But, Brexit happened and, almost against my reserved nature, as in, I’m very careful with what I release on social media, and a podcast is considered social media, almost against my reserved nature I do want to share my reflections on this whole… let’s say, situation. But I’m not just talking about Brexit, also about the political situation in Spain and also about the importance, more now than ever as the political class is crumbling, the importance of creating a world of work that makes people’s lives better.   As I said, three parts to this episode and the first is Brexit. On 23rd June, 52% of 71% of the UK’s British nationals aged 18 and over – and you do the math, voted for the UK to leave the European Union. So, the first thing I’d like to say is, if you’re British and are ashamed of being British right now, of which there are many, I’ve heard it first hand and second hand, don’t be. Because 48% of the population voted remain. Not just that, I was actually incredibly touched by how much people, in my circles, put themselves out there showing support for the Remain vote and even asking others to do the same. And remember, foreigners residing in Britain like myself, couldn’t vote. So these were British people making it very clear that they wanted to remain in the European Union. More about that later. In contrast to the couple of posts I saw during the campaign by foreign residents in the UK saying they didn’t feel welcome, I’ve been really touched by people speaking against the xenophobic vote. And hang on, I’m not saying that everyone who voted to leave was xenophobic, but there was a proportion of the vote that certainly was. So, I’m not angry at the fact that people voted Brexit. In fact, pretty much like the lovely Bernie who writes a newsletter every Sunday (as opposed to myself who is just incapable of doing one every month) I was actually very surprised at the amount of people who turned up to vote – 72%! Considering that the turnout for the last set of local elections was under 40% and I think the same for the last general elections, not bad at all. So, I’m not angry at that. I’ll tell you what I’m angry at. Two things in fact. This morning on Spanish radio I heard one of the journalists say, “ There’s something I don’t understand. David Cameron calls a referendum to see if people want to leave Europe. And then he campaigns to stay. So why did he call it then?” Ah, of course what this very insightful Spanish journalist didn’t know was the context in which the referendum was promised. The UK Independent Party was promising to do quite well in the last general elections, until Mr Cameron and friends, because I very much doubt that Cameron has been ruling the country on his own, they decided that they couldn’t let their votes go to UKIP. UKIP had done really well in the European Elections, when their flagship promise in their manifesto was to get out of Europe. So, as the Tory votes, and politicians, started to migrate (ha ha, I thought I’d use that word), as the Tory votes began to migrate to UKIP, Cameron needed to do something drastic. And that something was promising a referendum. I need to say here too, that a few years ago, I heard Cameron say on Radio4 that Britain would never leave Europe. It wasn’t a reporter summarizing what he’d said, it wasn’t even a soundbyte. I heard the interview live on Radio4. Liar.   So I’m ang