What we have here is an epitomic example of argument by outraged belief. The writer would rather starve in the achievement of their misguided religion (and more importantly would rather others starved) than accept that the entire premise of their faith was ill founded from the start.



Allow me to counter just a few of the assertions made in this diatribe of “democracy” confounded. The original referendum, now more than three years in the past, reduced an enormously complex issue to an absurdly binary choice, which it later transpired was all but meaningless when it came to interpreting the real content of voters’ intentions.



The narrow victory for leave was undoubtedly influenced not only by all sorts of unprincipled shenanigans by the proponents of leave, running from patent lies to funding and information interventions by malevolent and even exterior agents pursuing interests that had nothing whatever to do with the wellbeing of the British people, but also by decades of poisonous propaganda distilled through the media mouthpieces of offshore billionaires in furtherance of their financial interests.



Mrs May set the tone which has led us to this nihilistic no-deal outcome with her “Brexit means Brexit” red lines. But during the referendum campaign itself, no one – not even Nigel Farage – was suggesting that Brexit actually implied the scorched-earth outcome that the writer now appears to believe is the only acceptable democratic outcome. We may have voted, but absolutely nobody voted for this.



Without wanting to embark on a long essay on political science and democratic constitutionalism, there is more to real democracy than one-off votes. A great deal more. The historical record is replete with examples of tyrants leveraging mass ignorance, manipulation and emotion to surge to power by means of plebiscite. The present Brexit imbroglio is just the latest example.



No lesser Brexiteer than David Davis, the first minister for Brexit, is on record as having said that the right and ability to change one’s mind is an essential mark of real democracy. This is one of the few things about which I agree with the man. In 2016, people had no idea what their vote entailed or even meant. We are much clearer now. And what is clear to me is that any Brexit, let alone a no-deal Brexit, will prove an unprecedented disaster to the country, but balm to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and assorted private-equity and hedge-fund spivs who even now are making billions shorting the British economy in expectation of the disaster Brexit they have played such a major role in engineering.



So I do not accept the writer’s prémices about my childishness or lack of democratic fibre. I hold that what would be democratic at this juncture is that we should be afforded another opportunity to decide on the Brexit question now that we know both what it entails and how outrageously we were conned the first time. That would indeed be democratic. Which is, I’m afraid, precisely why the writer is so terrified that it might happen.