Dear Paul,

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you, although I appreciate this might seem weird. I thought about writing to you last night, after I saw on your Facebook that you were excited about voting leave, and worried about your vote being changed because you had voted with a pencil. I think you were probably joking about that bit though. But I sort of wanted to see what the results were.

We were at school together from the age of about nine I think. We had the same surname, but we are not related. You have a sister with exactly the same name as my sister, if I remember right. We weren’t in many of the same classes I don’t think, but I remember sitting near you on the bus on our first school trip to France. I remember doing art GCSE together too, and that once my bra pinged open and you fastened it back up from me. It was one with three or four hooks, I think, and you said you didn’t see many like this anymore, and then Mrs Green walked in and told us both off. And I believed we snogged once, on a night out at the Queens Hall and then again in a kebab shop afterwards. You probably don’t know that I hunted you out that night. I had just had a big break up and I remember saying to my friends that I quite fancied seeing if I could get off with you. And I was pleased to find I could!

Anyway that’s my embarrassing confession of my chest, back to the reason I am writing. I don’t know much about you, what you do now as a job or where you live. I don’t know what your politics are and what papers you read so I don’t want to make any judgements. But I thought I would tell you a bit about what I have done since we left school and why I ended up thinking so differently about such a big issue from you.

I came up to Edinburgh after I left home for university. It was much further away from Bradford than I thought, I was a bit shocked when my mum’s car left Newcastle and I saw a sign saying there was two hundred miles to go. I came to study History. It was hard at first. You remember how I always came pretty much top in everything at school but it wasn’t the same at uni. You had to do all this work that nobody told you how to do and there was no-one to help you. And I was homesick, but there were loads of people who had travelled loads or left home years ago and they were all really confident. But I got the hang of it in the end.

I started studying Russian language too, just because I thought it would make me sexy and interesting I think (it didn’t). That was harder than I thought as well, you had to learn a whole new alphabet and everything. Then I had a couple of bad relationships and decided to move to Siberia, as you do. One guy had taken a knife and destroyed pretty much every piece of property I owned. Which was rough but it sorted of made me realise how much stuff I didn’t need. And then when I lived in Russia I lived pretty simply. Everyone out there lived in tiny flats and had no money (although I am sure its very different now), it sort of changed my standards a bit, made me believe in, well, not having that much stuff.

Anyway after uni I just kept studying. I did a masters and then started a PhD. I did a lot of work on how the media works, how the newspapers give out messages. For example, if there is a story about a family whose house is burnt down, you might get a picture of the family and the caption underneath might say something like “peter Andrews with his wife and dog outside their family home. The dog’s name is Bernie”. As in, the wife doesn’t matter at all. (women don’t matter at all). Or if they print a story saying how bad it is that people in a certain postcode can’t have a certain cancer drug, you never ask why people who develop cancer drugs should be charging so much money for them, you blame someone else. So again, all this made me question things a bit more.

Then I met a man who I went on to marry. He was really posh. I mean really posh. I went to parties with all his parents’ friends and they would say things like “I think you are very brave for being here”. Can you believe that? Like I was brave for just for feeling like I was perfectly good enough to go to their stupid party?

It is very weird becoming part of a family like that. My kids are pencilled in on a family tree that goes back to about the year 1400. And my husband’s family are very small scale posh people as these things go. There are so many more of these people than you think. Because these people even exist that’s what puts the property prices up for everybody else. And because they are the landlords they put all the rents up too.

So anyway the reason I am telling you this is because, while there are lots of lovely posh and rich people, I believe that this inquality is ridiculous. And often these people don’t mix in so you don’t know about them.  Maybe, just maybe, it would be fair enough if these people had earned their money but they didn’t. And I genuinely believe that the fact we are always ruled by people who didn’t earn their money is the biggest problem we have. But because they control everything, and they control the government and the newspapers. And they can take risks because they don’t have to face the consequences. Too often, life is all just one big game for people who have never and will never need to worry about how they are going to pay for new shoes for their kids.

And its not even, I don’t think, because they are greedy and they want to keep all of their money. Some of it’s a bit more weird than that. For a couple of years I got involved working with a load of even more posh people. I wanted to campaign to stop children being sent to boarding school. I had never thought about this before, but loads of people are still sending their kids away to school when they are seven or eight, sometimes younger and it totally messes them up. Some of them still turn out really nice but some of them don’t.

If you think about it, they go away when they are seven and they have to not cry else they will get the shit beaten out of them. So if they are not careful they just become completely programmed to make sure whatever happens, its always someone else getting the shit beaten out of them always someone else getting their head flushed down the loo. So I want to say to you, because you might not have thought about this, you make sure that’s not what Boris Johnson is doing to you.

Anyway some of the people I was working with turned out to be real bastards and that’s what made me realise that for some people, and I do feel sorry for them, power is a thing in itself. If at some point in their life people have felt like they have no power they will do everything they can to feel powerful an often the best way to do that is to take someone elses power away. And I think that happens a lot in politics. Make them need you and then say no. To benefits. To job opportunities. To asylum. But they are very good at covering themselves up too, so I suppose I just want to warn you, just make sure that its not you and your family they come for. Or that you are persuaded someone else is to  blame.

Like I say, I don’t know your politics, but you are a nice guy and I worry that you might be having the piss taken out of you. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, they don’t give a shit about you or your family. They want to keep you down and they want you to be racist and sexist and blame immigrants and women for the things you don’t like about your life and your country so they can shaft you and you won’t notice.

So what I wanted to say is this. I am happy for you that you have got a result that you wanted. But now, please, please, make sure you do everything you can to really get what you wanted out of it. If you want the best for your kids fight for them to be able to have everything they dreamed of, the best education, the best healthcare, a nice, kind, loving world to grow up in. And hold to account those people who govern you, and make sure they keep their promises. We voted differently, but I hope this can be the start of different people working together and communicating, who basically want the same things.

Lots of love,

Sally xx