SNP Brexit folly is an affront to democracy for which they’ll pay

ON June 23, 2016, 17,410,742 of us voted to leave the European Union. On a turnout of more than 72 per cent of the UK electorate – higher than at any general election since 1992 – the winning margin was in seven digits.

More British people voted for Leave that day than have ever, in the history of this democracy, voted for anything.

This even when the playing field had been so blatantly skewed in favour of Remain.

Our continued membership of the EU was supported by the Prime Minister, the Government, the leaders of almost all our political parties, much of the Press, the governor of the Bank of England and the mass of big business.

And they fought dirty. A UK government leaflet – produced and mailed out at taxpayers’ expense – was sent to every British household, urging a vote for Remain.

The official guide on how to participate in the referendum included a graphic of the ballot paper with a hand marking a cross in the Remain box; and President Barack Obama, no less, was wheeled out to menace us as to the consequences, in terms of US trade and favour, should we have the temerity to back Leave.

Finally – desperately – the deadline to register for voting was shamelessly extended.

Chancellor George Osborne threatened us with a cataclysmic slash-and-burn Budget; David Cameron, quite improperly, made an hysterical appeal from the very steps of No 10 – and yet, with all that, Remain lost, as the people of Britain voted to take back control.

We might remind ourselves, too, that the legislation for the referendum was voted through the House of Commons by virtually all MPs, of all parties, save the SNP.

The government leaflet not only described the vote as a ‘once in a generation’ choice but declared, unambiguously: ‘This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.’

And, indeed – if none of this is good enough for you – remember that at the general election last June, and even excluding Ukip’s negligible tally, 82.3 per cent of everyone who voted backed either the Tories or Labour, both of whom were unambiguously committed to delivering Brexit. (In Scotland, between them, they won 57 per cent of the poll.)

It is worth rehearsing all this because, to extraordinary degree, most of the lieutenants and cheerleaders for Remain have proved very sore losers. They continue to disparage the referendum result and, in some cases, to question the wisdom of the popular vote in principle.

Indeed, it began almost immediately, with shameless demands that the unambiguous will of the people be somehow set aside. ‘I wouldn’t rule anything out,’ Tony Blair assured the BBC.

‘We can stop this madness through a vote in Parliament,’ tweeted Labour MP David Lammy. ‘Let us not destroy our economy on the basis of lies and the hubris of Boris Johnson.’ The Lib Dems within days declared they would fight the next election on a pledge to reverse the referendum – yes, the Lib Dems – and Lord Heseltine called for cross-party talks about ‘rethinking the result’.

Sneered

It was not enough even to sneer – as has since been sneered abundantly – that the mass of those of us who voted Leave are (allegedly) white, poor, never went to university, and presumably drift around L S Lowry townscapes walking our whippets.

The EU and its well-heeled cheerleaders are the angels of the Enlightenment: we represent only ‘crabbed, cowed racism and xenophobia’. Or, if you prefer, the ‘populism and nativism that’s uniting the have-nots of Europe and America against the political establishment’.

A US news magazine dismissed the decision of more than 17million British people as a ‘primal scream’; someone in the New Statesman declared Brexit to be but the wish of ‘the frightened, parochial lizard brain of Britain’. And the subsequent triumph of Donald Trump, of course, became yet another stick to beat us with.

Senior citizens are especially targeted. Early this year – on the BBC, of course – David Aaronovitch argued that by the time we do leave the EU, enough tedious elderly Leave voters will have died for Remain, by then, to have a majority. ‘It’s not my intention to be callous,’ he added, trying not to sound like a man who might have shares in flu.

On setting aside inconvenient referendums, of course, the EU and its surrogates have unfortunate form. Popular votes in Denmark and France against the Maastricht Treaty were simply ignored. When the Irish voted down the Treaty of Nice, they were made to vote again; at the 2005 general election, the three main UK parties promised us a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. (It never happened.)

It is most unlikely, though – with barely a year to go before the gates of Brussels clang behind us – that there will be a second referendum.

It would require both the downfall of Theresa May and a dramatic change of mind by the Labour leadership, neither of which is probable. Our rulers are smart enough to grasp that a second poll would be the perfect excuse for the Eurocrats to give Britain as bad an exit deal as possible and, whatever some casual opinion polling has suggested, it is odds-on we would vote Leave again.

Most of us backed Brexit because we believe in popular sovereignty; that the laws which affect our lives should be made here, in Britain, by people we can vote out of power as we see fit. And we are sick of powerful elites that refuse to listen to us. In such circumstances, a re-run of the Brexit poll would be tantamount to a declaration of war; it would be one of extraordinary venom and would poison our politics for decades.

We have made our decision, we are weary of the bickering and the grandstanding, we expect our rulers to keep their word – and implement what we decided.

Meanwhile, this side of the Tweed, the extraordinarily cloth-eared Nicola Sturgeon continues to bang on about Brexit, and this week unveiled an apocalyptic report predicting untold economic woes should Scotland be ‘dragged out’ into anything resembling Brexit as normally defined.

The folly of the First Minister and the Nationalists in this is quite extraordinary. For one, the mass of Scots are sick of the SNP clattering on, like a stuck record, about the constitution – and punished the party sharply at last year’s general election for its ongoing obsessions.

Threatened

For another – and that was surely a takeaway from the EU referendum – predicting the Ten Plagues of Egypt tends not, these days, to work.

None of us likes to be threatened and the public have indeed noticed that the woes then so confidently forecast by Mr Osborne, Mark Carney and the rest have failed to materialise. The economy is growing; the pound recovering; unemployment and inflation both falling.

But it is stupid even in terms of the Nationalists’ own long game. If independence does come, it will certainly be as the result of an emphatic popular vote.

Does Nicola Sturgeon really wish to saddle her successors with the utterly poisonous precedent that a referendum outcome can be belittled, disparaged, gainsaid and finally frustrated by the will of the deep state?

And why can it not dawn on her that the very pleas she makes on behalf of continued Scottish membership of the EU – a membership repudiated, incidentally, in June 2016 by a third of habitual SNP voters – are, with minimum adjustment, arguments for the Union itself?