Bitter Remoaners ignore May’s plea for unity on Brexit

THERESA May’s unifying plea for an end to the divisions over Brexit was last night hit by a vicious backlash from Remain supporters.

The Prime Minister is to urge anti-Brexit voters to ‘respect the legitimacy’ of the referendum in a major speech at Lancaster House in London tomorrow.

She will also say people who backed the Leave side have a ‘responsibility to act magnanimously’.

Mrs May will call for ‘an end to the division and the language associated with it – Leaver and Remainer and all the accompanying insults – and unite to make a success of Brexit and build a truly global Britain’.

But yesterday former Remain campaigners continued their bitter attack on the suggestion Britain will leave the EU single market. They have argued that Britain should stay inside, even though it would mean continued free movement of migrants and accepting rulings from the European Court of Justice.

Joe Carberry, co-executive director of Open Britain, the successor organisation to the official Remain campaign, wrote on Twitter: ‘May prepares to impale the economy based on a mandate that doesn’t exist.’

Former education secretary Nicky Morgan leapt upon the findings of one opinion poll which suggested a narrow majority of Leave voters would object to controls on immigration if it cost them financially.

She said: ‘The Government will be doing a disservice to the country... if it dogmatically pursues a hard, destructive Brexit where immigration control is the be- all- and- end- all, our economy is undermined and people are left poorer.’

Lib Dem leader Tim Farron told the BBC’s Sunday Politics his party will vote against the triggering of Article 50 – to begin the two-year process of leaving the EU – unless there is a second referendum to give people a final say on the Brexit deal.

He said that heading for a ‘hard Brexit’ – in which the UK would be outside of the single market and the customs union – was not on the ballot paper in last June’s EU referendum, and accused the Prime Minister of adopting ‘ the Nigel Farage vision’ of Brexit.