I mistrust too much anger in politics. A bit is all right, especially when the other side are telling lies or refusing to listen. But not too much. And not too much self-righteousness either, please. None of us is right all the time. That’s why we have a Loyal Opposition and an adversarial Parliament, and the presumption of innocence, come to that.

Perhaps I am just too conscious of the horrors of Civil War. I am drawn to historical depictions of these wars, by a fearful fascination. How did men of the same nation end up slaughtering each other? Could this happen among our gentle hills and woods? Yes, it could, and has. Start treating opponents as enemies, and there is no telling where it might end.

I live in a city that was besieged in such a war, and where you can still, if you look carefully, find traces of old fortifications in now-peaceful suburbs. I have read, in history and in fiction, depictions of these events, of the horrible relentless inevitability with which the two sides have first ceased to listen to each other, then turned their backs on each other and finally begun killing each other. The past, as Evelyn Waugh once said, is the only thing we possess for certain. We should pay close attention to it.

Here is Kipling’s ‘Edgehill Fight’, (read it in full here http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_edgehill.htm )

… full of pain and regret at the turning of Englishman against Englishman:

‘And the raw astonished ranks stand fast

To slay or to be slain

By the men they knew in the kindly past

That shall never come again’

You might find something a little similar in Gore Vidal’s rather beautiful description (in his novel ‘Lincoln’) of Abraham Lincoln visiting wounded Confederate prisoners of war. One of the badly-injured young men, unlikely to survive and in some pain, turns away from him in loathing and disgust. ‘Son, we are all the same at the end’, says the unhappy President, quietly. The reader alone knows how true this will be, and how soon. It is in this book that Lincoln, driven to misery and self-loathing by the carnage he must pursue to the end, rages that the very rooms in which he works and sleeps seem to have filled up with blood.

And these episodes are nothing to the Civil Wars of Russia and Spain, both in our times, adding modern weapons to pre-mediaeval cruelty. Not to mention the merciless wars of Ireland in the early part of this century, and their more recent sequels.

So I sicken a little when – in a country divided almost equally on a contentious issue – my own side takes such a scornful view of my opponents. When I wrote my Mail on Sunday column http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/12/we-crushed-the-remainers-now-we-must-be-kind-to-them.html

at the end of last week, I did not know until I was at my keyboard how very much I felt that some sort of generosity was called for. If you love your country – and this is the only real motivation for wanting its independence – then you also love your fellow countrymen and your fellow countrywomen. Therefore if you disagree with them , you seek to do so with patience, kindness and tolerance, and a readiness to listen. So what if they don't do the same? 'Render unto no man evil for evil'.

To me, for many years, the most moving part of any election has been the victor’s declaration (not always made) to serve *all* his constituents, whether they voted for him or not – and my own (Labour) MP has been an exemplary follower of this principle, to my personal knowledge. Heaven help us if it is ever otherwise.

Most sensible pro-EU people now recognise that the vote went against them and that we must therefore leave the EU.

I have mocked those who did not recognise the outcomeof the referendum and fantasised about frustrating the result, reminding them of Brecht’s joke about how, the people having failed the elite, the elite would like to elect a new people. Too bad. Once you accept the democratic principle, the majority is the absolute decider.

They, like those who wanted to leave, took part in the campaign on that basis. But of course it was never quite as simple as that , especially in a free, plural society with a de facto separation of powers, adversarial newspapers, law courts, a powerful civil service and the BBC,

Would leavers, had we lost, have accepted the vote? Yes. Would we have sunk back and given up all hope of leaving forever? I somehow doubt it. We would also have continued to seek to block many aspects of EU membership, such as Schengen and the Euro, Turkish or Ukrainian membership of the EU and any plans for a European Army.

Remainers are now doing the approximate equivalent. Do I blame them? No. What is more, they have quite a lot to work on. It is silly to pretend that they don’t. Let me explain.

Be in no doubt that there are many and varied ways of achieving the apparently simple aim of leaving the EU. And that if that aim is badly messed up, there could one day even come a campaign to rejoin the EU, which will undo all you have achieved.

One of the many odd, unsatisfactory things about the referendum is that the movement which won it dissolved itself at the point of victory. We did not elect a new government (though we destroyed the old one, which has been replaced by a pale ghost of its former self). We cannot turn to the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign and say ‘what exactly did you mean to do next?’, because they are scattered to the winds, some in internal exile, some hidden inside the government, some fulminating in UKIP factions.

If we could ask them, what would they say? How deeply had they thought about the matter? Did they even have a unified position? Weren’t some of them globalists who wanted Britain out of the protective embrace of the EU so it could be more open to the keen winds blowing from the far East?

Weren’t others more my sort, who value Britain’s special unique nature and didn’t want to see it absorbed or erased or diluted either by the EU or by globalisation? These aren't really allies. they have a single negative desire - to get out of the EU. But their positive plans are hostile to each other.

Then there’s the question of responsibility. Victory in an election (as those who take part well know) means that you are now personally in charge of keeping the promises you made. Victory in a referendum has no such automatic price. We did not elect a new government last June. We just robbed the existing government of the central pillar of most of its activity, and forced it to do something it didn’t want to do and will do as slowly and unwillingly as it can. There is no force in British politics which can change that.

The Leave campaigners then either went home quietly, or began writing rude memoirs about their allies, or embarked on wild political manoeuvres, only to be rolled flat by the bizarre juggernaut of Theresa May, who inherited Downing Street because she had been vague and rather cowardly, and who was given the job of implementing a policy she opposed -presumably because she had opposed it more feebly than most.

We must also wonder, given their performance for many years before in front-line politics, whether *all* the major figures in the Leave campaign were in fact wholly committed to the cause they espoused; or whether they ever intended to win. I was utterly amazed when Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove declared themselves in favour of leaving. It was at that moment that my former certainty, that ‘Remain’ would win the vote, began to evaporate. I had actually argued with Mr Gove, many years before, that the main reason leaving the EU was unpopular was hat no leading politicians were in favour of it. The public therefore assumed that it was a dangerous policy. At the time, as I recall, he took the David Cameron view, that it was a marginal subject we shouldn't 'bang on' about.

Of course both sides were unscrupulous. But that's not worth worrying about. As so often, Larry Elliott of ‘The Guardian’ makes the key point very well. He disposes of Remainers’ moans about the untruths told by the ‘Leave’ campaign here

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/dec/04/brexit-debate-post-match-interview-football-arsenal-arsene-wenger

But this frivolous disregard for truth (on both sides) was partly a consequence of the irresponsibility I mention above. As soon as the campaign was over, both sides bolted back to their normal homes and loyalties, like vandals discovered in mid-crime by the police, scattering down every available dark alleyway, never to meet again.

I also have to mention the amazing predicament of the Labour Party, whose leader was ideally positioned to do as little as he could to discourage his party’s voters from registering a huge protest against mass immigration - one millions of them had been longing to make for years.

So, we have a narrow victory, based on unique circumstances, obtained largely by people who didn’t know (and hadn’t thought very hard about) what they were going to do next. Is this really a sound basis for a triumphalist parade? Not everyone on our side is brilliant and good. Not everyone on the other side is stupid or wicked. Fight them, by all means, but with reason and facts, not self-righteous rage. If the vote were held again now, it might just as easily go the other way. Is it wise to pretend to be unaware of that, or to think it just doesn’t matter?

And now, as a nation and an economy, we are up against an EU in which at least one very skilful and dogged rival, France, will do all she can to do us down. France has several reasons to do this. Her establishment wants to squash Marine le Pen’s Front National, and making an exit from the EU look hard and painful will help this process. Then there’s the little matter of the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, and French resentment (shared by Germany) of the continuing dominance of the City of London in European finance. Do you think they’re going to be nice to us?

And is it really not worth noting that figures such as Christopher Booker, the most sustained and well-informed campaigner against British membership of the EU, are genuinely worried that we might damage ourselves if we seek too much, too fast? The attitude of some on this blog has been close to Stalinist in their empurpled unreasoning wrath. Any minute now I expect to hear voices accusing me and Christopher Booker of wrecking railroads and sabotage, and of being secret agents of Brussels.



Sure, economic logic dictates that they want our markets. But the EU has always been a political body, with economics coming second to politics, or how could they have agreed to merge their currencies? Politics comes first. They cannot make it easy or cheap for us to leave. There will be a price of some sort.

Finally, I’d mention (as I did in my Sunday article) the fact that the ghastly embodiment of cynicism, the Conservative Party is still in office in this country. This is a party which is very good at political murder, as Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith could readily attest. Those Tories who push now for a hard and fast departure may find that Mrs May and her inner circle give them all the freedom they want, wait for them to fail, and then destroy them.

What might the result of that be? Let’s speculate wildly. A catastrophic failure of negotiations, a British walk-out, or a an EU refusal to concede another inch, a run on Sterling (which is waiting to happen again anyway), a humiliating return to talks (on worse terms) and then perhaps that long-threatened election, fought as a second referendum on the half-hearted deal we eventually get?

I don’t know, and nor do you. All I know is that I find the noisy, chest-thumping over-confidence of some Leavers increasingly hard to take. I think it is dangerous for the country and, regardless of whether anyone likes what I say or not, I am going to point this out.