I marched for a second referendum on Brexit so I could finally be down with the kids

Whitney Houston was right, they are the future. And politicians are pushing a vision that would make their future worse

I am not a politician. I am, however, a dad, who lives in the world. A world in which, over the last few years, sanity seems to have been replaced by a kind of aimless mania.

I realise that as a nearly 47-year-old man, I am entering into a kind of confused middle-age where it is completely natural to feel a befuddlement at all things new, but this feels different.

It seems that all over the place, politics has been hijacked by a social media-fuelled political populism, that simplifies arguments, infantilises voters, and then ransacks the discourse of the country they infect. (Read How To Lose A Country by Ece Temelkuran for a full breakdown of the breakdown).

I come from a place called Leigh in Lancashire, and despite living in the “metropolitan elite bubble” of London these days, I go home regularly with my kids to see my friends and family.

We have all watched and seen for ourselves how 35 years of post-industrial neglect from successive governments has laid waste to our once-proud towns outside of London.

In all honesty, we’re used to seeing a kind of neglect from centralised power. But since austerity came in, a wilful and deliberate, legislated cruelty seems to have replaced governmental duty of care.

Whatever I or anyone else thinks of Brexit, whether it is a good or bad idea politically or financially, it seems clear that those in power are using it as a battering ram for their own agendas, and as a convenient distraction from more pressing issues in the country, like poverty, homelessness, climate change, and failing infrastructure.

With two children in this world I literally have skin in the game, and I think it is the least we can do for them, with all the new information we have at our disposal, to make sure we know what the whole country wants now.

If I am on a web page and I click to close it, a box flashes up that says “are you sure you want to leave this site?” How can there be more safeguards against leaving a website unwisely, than there are for ending a decades-long membership of a political institution?

I don’t want to influence what people vote for, I just want people to know exactly what they are voting for before they commit to generations of change.

In that, I actually don’t feel old and befuddled at all. In fact, for the first time in years, I feel like I am down with the kids, cos as Whitney Houston said, they are the future, and in the end it will be them, not Theresa or Jeremy, who lead us out of the chaos. And that’s why I decided to take my kids along on Saturday too, even at the risk of it costing me a Wagamamas as payment for their inevitable boredom.

Shaun Keaveny is a radio broadcaster who was once runner-up on ‘Celebrity Ready Steady Cook’