Vince Cable, not Brexit voters, is the one stuck in the past

Everyone, understandably, is focusing on the white ‘nostalgia’ bit of Vince Cable’s speech to the Lib Dem conference. His slur against older Brexit voters, whom he thinks voted against the EU because they want to go back to a world where ‘passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’, has caused a stink, and rightly so. But there was something else in the speech too that ought to send shivers down the spine of all of us who believe in democracy. Something which captured better than anything else in recent months just how fragile the ideal of democracy is in this era of political-class hysteria over Brexit.

It was the section where Cable talked about having been on a political journey. ‘I myself have been on a journey’, he said. He then described that journey:

‘[M]y own initial reaction to the referendum was to think maybe there was little choice but to pursue Brexit.