A People's Vote: the least worst option?

Sometimes, less is more. This can certainly be true in situations of disagreement or confrontation and let's face it, the Brexit referendum has introduced confrontation and disagreement into our society on a scale unprecedented in many of our lifetimes. Confrontation is unsettling - many people avoid it if possible, others swing in with gusto and aggression, mistaking antagonism and hostility for strength. A better approach is neither avoidance nor hostility but the courage of calm assertiveness, along with a refusal to be distracted from the issue at stake. This is where so many of us in this country have gone wrong in the last 28 months. Too many, on both sides of the argument, are either attacking each other or spinning off in ever more detailed and tangential debates.

From the Leave supporters, the slew of bizarre claims continues. The EU accounts are never audited. EU politicians are unelected. Why can't we trade with non-EU countries? Membership of the EU has turned areas of the UK into no-go Muslim strongholds governed by Sharia law. Although many actually believe the nonsense they peddle, these are, at heart, diversion tactics. You can waste hours debating them and pointing to evidence that refutes the rubbish, but if you do so, you will never “win”. Such statements are articles of faith to the supporters on the street.

At the same time, the Remain supporters have their own sidetracks – may they all be ever so relevant and worrying, they nevertheless dilute the flow of resistance, reducing the ability to hold any one person accountable for any one action or consequence. However outraged we are today about predicted medicine shortages, tomorrow the heat is off because we are worried instead about NHS staffing. The following day it is holiday visas. There are simply not enough hours in the day or days in the week to maintain the pressure on any single issue and force answers. The circus continually moves on. Unsurprisingly, much of the population has tuned out and lost interest because of the complexity of the argument. It is tiresome and exhausting trying to follow so many threads about immigration, the Irish border, economics, workers' rights, food standards, fishing quotas, air travel, customs unions, trade deals, tax avoidance, animal rights, defence strategies, NHS staffing, fruit-picking, holiday visas, scientific collaborations, arts projects, satellites etc etc.

Meanwhile, as the footsoldiers of Brexit keep us busy arguing about the shape of bananas, and we spread our defence ever thinner trying to comprehend the sheer scale of the fallout, the Brexit generals push forward their overall subversion of our democracy without meaningful challenge to the main artery of the fiasco: Vote Leave broke electoral law. That's not an allegation. It is a matter of fact as established by the Electoral Commission earlier this year. Yet extraordinarily, neither the Government, nor the official Opposition nor the Metropolitan Police has yet to show any interest in this assault on our democracy.

When holding another party to account, you should never allow them to play the distraction game, and you should avoid muddying your own waters by introducing more and more outraged examples of “and another thing”. Keep the complaint clear and specific and you have more chance of seeing it through. The current mess, for all its convolutions, is also very simple. A hugely important vote was won by a tiny margin in a campaign of lies and criminal activity. To allow that to go unchecked is to surrender our democracy. It sets an unthinkable precedent for future elections in this country. And the stakes could not be higher. As a consequence of the vote millions of people will be stripped of their rights. For EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, this may be the right to live in their own homes, to work or to stay with their families and to access the healthcare to which their taxes contribute. At the same time, the entire UK population is being stripped of European citizenship and the rights that come with it. If a conman tricks someone out of their life-savings through lies and deception, 99.9% of us would recognise the wrong. We would not approve of the conman keeping the spoils. We would demand reparation for the victim and punishment for the conman.

And our political chaos really is that simple. Don't argue with the detail. Don't follow the Brexiteers down their insane rabbit holes of diversion and confusion. Just repeat, like a broken record, that they lied and broke the law, violating our democracy, and as a result stand poised to take away peoples' rights.

The march of 700,000 people on Saturday for A People's Vote has changed the narrative. It is no longer possible to deny that millions in the country are uncomfortable with the result of 2016. A movement attracting the second largest protest in British history cannot be wished away. The Brexit leaders have been quick to recognise the change and have adjusted their defences accordingly. It is no longer “we are all Leavers now”. The claim now is that a further referendum would be anti-democratic. They accept that doubters exist in large numbers, but they offer a new justification for ignoring them. Astonishingly, the same people who have literally sabotaged our democracy, now claim that to try to correct for that offence would be anti-democratic.

Maybe we would still vote to leave in the event of a new vote that stayed within the bounds of the law and honesty. But democracy demands that we find that out. On one level, another vote is terrifying and does have a faint, but undeniable whiff of anti-democracy. Three years ago, we would have been mad to plan for it. But we are no longer where we were three years ago. As ever, it is no good arguing for what we wish were true. We can only start from where we actually are. We all wish that the referendum had been honest and legal and that the electorate had been trusted with the truth. But we are where we are and any way forward must start from here. Our real options no longer include a sensible 2016 campaign. Our real options are threefold. The first is to let the conmen get away with it and to pursue Brexit in some form determined by a subset of the disunited Tory party and thereby send the message that no election in the future can be taken seriously. It is abundantly clear that whatever form Brexit might take, it will never match what we were promised. This surely is undemocratic both in acceptance of the historic crime and laying the foundations for future abuse. It is supremely dangerous for both these reasons. The second is for Parliament to call out the conmen and unilaterally declare that Brexit will be stopped. Though it is possible or even probable that we would have had a different outcome with an honest campaign, to assume so at this late stage without checking also appears undemocratic – the argument would continue to rage for years. The third option is to say that the referendum was flawed and the law of our democracy was broken. Some sort of Brexit can be achieved but it will look nothing like what we were told to expect. We can still go ahead and do this but given the enormity of the decision and the scale of the repercussions, we need to check that it really is what people want now that we know the truth. Surely this is the least undemocratic of the three options available?

In other words, to misquote Churchill: “another referendum is the worst option, except for all the others.”