Strong, democratic case for another vote

HERE’S a quote from a senior Leave figure, about the holding of a second referendum on the terms of Brexit, after the June 2016 Leave vote: “we obviously wouldn’t oppose that[..;] there’s a strong democratic case for it”.

Who said that? Dominic Cummings, in an interview with the Economist in January 2016.

In that interview, he also observed that triggering Article 50 without first defining the end terms “would be like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger.

“No-one in their right mind would begin a legally defined period to conduct negotiations before they actually knew [...] what this process was going to yield.”

It’s quite clear (in response to Roger Gough - letters, September 4) how the referendum process was flawed, leading to the current chaos: those terms (of Brexit) were never defined.

This lack of definition allowed many to vote for something which was contradictory and unachievable (leave, yet get the exact same benefits...), and since then, for different factions to falsely claim mandates for their various preferred Brexit visions.

Was the vote a “democratic decision” to leave the customs union? - unclear.

To crash out without a deal? - No. Our representative democracy (Parliament) has tried in vain to “honour the result” of this experiment in direct democracy, but has failed due to its inherent contradictions.

Their exposure over the past three years makes it ever clearer that a second referendum on the Brexit terms would have been the sensible way forward. Mr Cummings, oddly, seems now to have a quite different agenda. But if we are to defuse these contradictions, there still seems no other real way out.

His “strong democratic case” for another vote remains. K Purver Totnes, Devon