Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

A People’s Vote is no substitute for an effective opposition

Sympathetic journalists covering the Remain movement are stuck by how far away it is from the ugliness of politics. Its activists are, to use a word that damns with faint praise, ‘nice’. It is better to be nice than vicious, of course. It is better to be nice than mendacious and unscrupulous and so criminally irresponsible you would burn down the whole country rather than admit to a mistake. But, we liberal reporters flinch at the sight of all the niceness. The nice never win a war, we think. Nice gets you nowhere in modern Britain.

When we ask how they will deal with thugs and manipulators of the calibre of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, they quote Michelle Obama and say, ‘When they go low, we go high’. When we ask who will lead a second remain campaign, they talk about then need to find ‘diverse voices’ from outside the old political world. When we press them for specific answers, they retreat into warm and woozy words that anaesthetise like a lullaby.

That the People’s Vote campaign has got this far is a tremendous achievement. Three-years ago, the idea the referendum could be rerun was so far out on the fringe it was barely discussed. Today every opinion poll shows a majority wants Britain to remain in the European Union, and there is a fair chance that Parliament will agree to a second referendum. Phil Wilson and Peter Kyle, who have been organising MPs, are confident they have the votes. A portion of the moderate Tories Boris Johnson purged from the Conservative party are now ready to support them, and Paula Sherriff and other previously dubious Labour MPs now see a second referendum as the only way to bring the crisis to an end.

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