Remainers’ vile abuse and rage is unprecedented in modern politics

There is no justification for the ruthless campaign by so-called liberals to smother legitimate debate

in a great many possibly needless deaths.

But what we are talking about now is future trade deals whose consequences for UK financial and business sectors (and hence economic growth) are disputed. To listen to the irreconcilable Remainers, you would think we were preparing to use chemical weapons on the population of the Home Counties – or, putting it in more relevant terms, to forcibly expel all of the European migrants who now live here in peace.

I fear that it was my youthful generation of political activists which began this demonising of our adversaries whose views we liked to claim were too unforgivable to be given a fair hearing. But back in the day, we were up against people who were complicit in the murder of civil rights workers or in favour of dropping napalm on civilians – not proponents of a different sort of tariff arrangement.

It is worth noting that this level of wild abuse has no precedent in the history of the argument over EU membership. The original “bastards” – the Eurosceptics who brought down John Major’s government – argued and obstructed relentlessly in the name of what they considered to be sacred principles: the sovereignty of the British Parliament and the supremacy of British law. They did not make scathing public pronouncements on the moral unfitness of their opponents or engage in unhinged rants about their private lives.

You will gather that I am referring here to the bizarre tirades which followed Boris Johnson’s speech last week setting out a possible vision for the post-Brexit future. You needn’t be a supporter of the Johnson leadership ambitions (as, indeed, I am not) to have found this hate-fest weirdly disproportionate and distasteful.

Clearly, the spectre of a Boris Johnson premiership is so terrifying to Brussels that its small army of Remainer allies must be summoned to battle stations every time he emerges into the light. The one charge of substance in the repeated assaults on his character revolves around the battle bus claim that an extra £350million per week would become available for the NHS after Brexit. That is certainly contentious – but it is not yet patently, certifiably, false like the claims of the Remain camp that unemployment would rocket and economic growth collapse if Leave won the Referendum vote. So who made the more seriously misleading statements? Or, to put it another way, who was the bigger liar?

Where does it come from then, this ruthless campaign designed to smother legitimate argument in blanket opprobrium? Some of it certainly emanates from vested interests: Big Corporations (as represented by the CBI) for whom the EU single market is an untrammelled paradise of profit, complete with the sort of regulatory system that undermines smaller competitors, and Big Labour whose power over national workforces is enshrined in EU “solidarity” protectionism.

But we have known – and argued about – all of this for years. What we are hearing now is not argument: it is vindictive, inchoate rage which seems to border on the pathological. The most well-organised and obviously orchestrated face of this is the Blairite machine. Undoubtedly a great many career trajectories (most notably Mr Blair’s own) were disrupted by the

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion nation’s decision. That disappointment is compounded by the Corbynite coup within Labour which has left many of its sitting MPs staring into an indefinite abyss. Hence, the visible (and endlessly audible) desperation of the likes of Lord Adonis and Ed Balls, who address the country with an oddly identical frantic delivery which speaks of despair.

Along with the Blair contingent there are the Friends of George Osborne and his old gang at the Treasury who have not yet given up on Project Fear. Perhaps that is the key to what is really going on here. This is a kind of monster movie: The Revenge of the Centrist Zombies who do not yet realise that they are dead. Having snuffed out dynamic political debate for a generation, they are outraged to find that, given a chance to have a direct say in actual policy, the electorate could be awakened from its apathetic slumber.

Like a dog that chews its paws out of boredom, the country had become neurotically frustrated by democratic inactivity. Even more terrifying, once it was aware that it could actually be heard, it decided that the whole business wasn’t pointless any more. Maybe we are living through an ugly but necessary repudiation of nonpolitics.

If this explosion of fury and counterfury is a defiant reaction to all those years of passive complacency, that will be a very difficult discovery to reverse, however many conspirators from the old order are determined to try. The conspirators, ironically, regard themselves as benign, tolerant liberals – the good guys who want to save the future from hate-mongers and those who sow division. To which one can only say: for God’s sake, listen to yourselves.

This is a kind of monster movie: ‘The Revenge of the Centrist Zombies’ who do not yet realise that they are dead