If despairing Remainers try to sabotage Brexit, they risk a moral collapse

Paul Mason writes: Unfortunately, for the most enthusiastic among the remain insurgency, it is no longer a question of convincing the floating voter. Some are openly in favour of ignoring the vote, sabotaging it with a parliamentary procedure. Now, the first of the legal challenges, fronted by the law firm Mishcon de Reya, has been launched.

If this response gathers support – to ditch democracy because you cannot persuade the other side – you really will have the moral collapse of centrist politics. You can sense the danger amid the peevishness and personal backstabbing among the Tory backbench and the Labour centrists of yesteryear. It is displacement behaviour for what they should be doing; which is governing the country and shaping a coherent negotiating pitch with Brussels.

I voted remain, but through gritted teeth. I put my long-term criticisms of the EU second to my desire to prevent a Thatcherite power grab and the installation of an unelected government whose impulse will be to shrink the state, and to attack the very people who thought they were voting for liberation on 23 June.

For those of us who warned that “the EU is killing European values” the task is not to sabotage the vote. It is to nurture and defend those European values in a Britain whose future is now uncertain. The values of secularism, internationalism, science and a market constrained by social justice. Above all, we should revel in the democratic moment – even as it goes against us. [Continue reading…]

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