People’s vote? It’s a miserable lie and a bankrupt insult to all democrats

WHEN I put my cross in the ‘Remain’ box twoand-a-half years ago, there was not a shadow of doubt in my mind that I was doing the right thing.

The EU was far from perfect. Its bureaucracy was labyrinthine, its profligacy obscene and the arrogance of its unelected apparatchiks seemed to me richly deserving of a sore one.

But I was willing to overlook less comely characteristics for a little devil-you-know peace and quiet.

I am Scottish after all. Some of us here haven’t known peace and quiet since the day in 2011 the SNP found themselves with a parliamentary majority and a clear shot on the independence goal.

But my side lost; Britain chose Leave. And then, wouldn’t you know it, circumstances changed. Isn’t it damnable how that keeps happening in politics?

Yes, as the months went by, circumstances were altered by growing clarity on what our Brexit deal with the EU might look like. Who could have predicted that?

Circumstances changed further when we learned of disagreement among Leavers over how the deal should be negotiated and which were ‘red line’ issues and which were not.

That is a significant departure from how it used to be, isn’t it? Because, before the referendum Leavers – rather like Scottish independence supporters pre-September 2014 – all sounded like they wanted the same thing.

Everywhere we look, it seems, there are circumstances pertaining to our leaving the European Union which are not precisely as they were before we put our crosses in our preferred box in 2016.

We have been swizzed, have we not, by a political outlook which refuses to stand still? It is almost as if we are moving through time or something.

Well, here is something else that has changed. If I am asked to vote for a second time on Britain’s membership of the EU, this time I am voting Leave. And there will not be a shadow of doubt in my mind that I am doing the right thing.

A second vote – always the wrong thing for me, however disappointing the result of the first one – is an increasingly realistic prospect. Almost half (48 per cent) of those questioned in the Mail’s Survation poll this week backed a socalled ‘People’s Vote’ on Theresa May’s Brexit deal compared to only 34 per cent who say that ship has sailed.

Meanwhile, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell opines that a second referendum looks ‘inevitable’ in the event of Mrs May failing to get her deal through the Commons on December 11.

For those Remainer MPs who still have not accepted defeat, his words fuel the belief that they may never have to. Step one toward that goal: thwart the May deal.

And, of course, there are few things EU negotiators would agree to more readily than the chance for the British people to atone at the ballot box for their impetuosity in imagining they could walk away without consequences.

Frustrated

Yes, the People’s Vote looms ever larger because, paradoxically, it is not about the people at all but a frustrated Establishment grappling with a grass roots political will that it wishes would go away.

I would vote Leave in any second referendum first and foremost because the term ‘People’s Vote’ is a miserable lie, an intellectually bankrupt, focus-group-inspired insult to those very people who engaged with the issues the first time around and cast their vote in a people’s vote.

I would defect to Leave because the ‘circumstances have changed’ argument is bereft of rigour and quite unworthy of the senior statesmen who trot it out.

Tony Blair goes as far as to say he would accept a Leave vote only if the electorate voted the same way again, this time in full knowledge of the aforementioned changes.

No, Mr Blair, you must accept the first Leave vote or accept you are not a democrat.

And the picture looks different today than two-and-a-half years ago. For a former Prime Minister who called his autobiography A Journey, I should think it would have been rather obvious the scenery changes as we go along.

I am only guessing here but the aftermath of any second referendum on our membership of the EU might bring yet more circumstances which could not be seen from this distance on our journey.

Are we to hold more referendums to take account of those or do we pull the drawbridge up as soon as you hear the answer you want?

I would vote Leave if there is a next time because I am a Scot and we know our way around specious arguments for second referendums up here.

No sooner was the ink dry on the two million ballot papers that secured Scotland’s place in the Union in 2014 than plans for Indyref 2 were forming and reasons why it must be soon full-throatedly rehearsed.

It is a game losing sides in binary plebiscites like to play – all the while knowing full well they would scream their throats raw with indignation if the roles were reversed and anyone had tried to supplant their victory with a re-run.

It must be Leave from here on in for me because the Brexit-supporting singer Morrissey has declared in interviews that, in spite of the referendum, Britain will never unshackle itself from Europe because neither Westminster nor the EU would allow it.

‘The unfortunate thing is that politicians only speak to other politicians,’ he says. ‘They don’t speak to the people.’ Morrissey is a cynical man with whom I disagree on almost everything these days, including this. And yet, the messier the post-Brexit referendum picture becomes, the more prescient his prediction.

Can it possibly be so? That, even in the year 2018, when democracy is king and Power to the People is such a given no one says it with a straight face any more, the power to overrule the people remains in the gift of the Establishment?

Cast your mind back a couple of years to the naming of a £200million polar research ship for a clue to the answer.

If voters decided such matters – and indeed they were asked to – the research ship would now be called RRS Boaty McBoatface. It was by far the most popular choice when the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) organised a public vote to determine the appellation their vessel should go by.

Honour

No, no, no, said NERC. That is a silly name. What about a sensible name such as RRS Sir David Attenborough? Thousands more votes flooded in for Boaty McBoatface – 12 times the number received from those wishing to honour our venerable TV naturalist and national treasure. The Establishment held sway.

They called the ship RRS Sir David Attenborough.

I would vote Leave in the event of a second referendum because there is no sense in asking the electorate a question if you don’t want to hear the answer. And it has been given once already.

And I would vote Leave, lastly, because I am a patriot. The story of these islands’ steadfastness in the face of direst adversity during the past century inspires like few others ever could. It is one which, in the weeks following the centenary of the Armistice, I have thought about more and more.

It no more makes me want to break up this precious union than be bullied or manipulated by the Continental bureaucrats of another one.