Which would damage Britain more, Brexit or a second referendum?

When I was a child, I lived with my parents. They always did their best for me and I was never hungry or shabby. When I grew up I decided I needed to make a life for myself away from home. I met a girl and we married. In the early days of our marriage, we were poorer than I had been when I lived with my parents, but we stuck at it and worked through various difficulties until we achieved a comfortable lifestyle, very considerably better than my parents had enjoyed. And because my parents were good parents they backed me throughout this struggle and were delighted with the outcome.

Now, bearing in mind that your parents may not live as long as you, tell me which is more damaging, to endure through the early difficult years of independence in order to make a good life for yourself, or to give up at the first hardship and go back to your parents’ home where it’s safe and secure in the short run?

There are some unfortunate people who, through no fault of their own, do not have an option. There are some people who choose the second option. But if everyone chose the second option, society would collapse, wouldn’t it?

Let us please remember that the 2016 Referendum was the UK electorate’s first opportunity for forty years to make a choice on the direction taken by the EU.

As it happens, I had read the fine print and voted ‘No’ in 1975. However, I blame no-one who was at that time under the impression that the EEC stood for free trade and nothing more. It’s no good now pointing to old documents, you really had to live through that campaign to know how much pressure was put upon a public that had only a couple of year’s experience of life on the inside and still saw an exciting prospect.

But to all those who now claim that changed circumstances within a scant two years necessitate another plebiscite to confirm our departure, may I politely enquire how vigorously you campaigned for a vote on the loss of sovereignty entailed by the formation of the EU at Maastricht? Were you satisfied with the opt-outs negotiated by Major or did you consider the UK was being marginalised within a determinedly integrating organisation? Not a change in circumstances worth a vote, eh?

How upset were you when the EU constitution, on which we had been promised a vote, was re-badged as the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through regardless of rejection by other countries? Did you worry at all about the erosion of the veto and the rise of majority voting? Did you care when the Eurozone members began meeting on their own to form a common position to put before the European Council, where they collectively outvoted the non-members? More huge changes, but again not worth a vote?

If none of these things caused you sufficient disquiet to call for a further referendum, then I respectfully suggest it is disingenuous to call for one now, when Brexit has not even been implemented and the only new information to hand is that negotiations turned out to be more difficult than expected. In that context, I invite you to bear in mind that prominent Remainers have publicly urged the EU to be tough on the UK in order to assist their campaign to reverse the decision to Leave. In other words, your own team has made a significant contribution to the difficulties of which you now complain.

The electorate gets one choice in forty years, the people make their choice and you think you can campaign with impunity for that choice to be overturned before it is even carried out? Seriously? You think that democracy in the UK will not be dreadfully damaged in the process? Two hundred years after Peterloo, has the establishment truly learned so very little?

Have you taken note of polls showing the low regard in which politicians are already held compared to other groups? In 2016 the government pledged to implement what the people decided. That pledge has not yet been met. If it is not met, then do not expect a restoration of trust in the political system within a generation.