Phillip James (VMail, March 21) proposes ignoring Alan Meekings’s ‘ranting’. But far from just ranting, Mr Meekings has brought out numerous pertinent facts that deserve notice in the continuing debate over Brexit.
It would be good if facts, rather than assertions and slogans, were made central. Let me try a couple.
It is often said or implied by ‘leavers’, that ‘remainers’ should just shut up and accept the referendum result, no matter how much the prospects now differ from those projected by the leave side in 2016. But just three weeks before the referendum, no less a person than Nigel Farage told the Daily Mirror that if the result were a 52:48 per cent win for ‘remain’, he would regard that as unfinished business. He went on to tell the BBC that if there were a narrow win for ‘remain’, there could be an unstoppable demand for a re-run of the referendum.
So if ‘remain’ had won by the same margin as ‘leave’ actually achieved, there’s no doubt UKIP – and some others – would have continued to contest the result, pressing the case for a further referendum.
Second: It’s a commonplace on the ‘leave’ side to refer to the decision of ‘the British People’. Nearly 52 per cent of actual voters voted ‘leave’. That amounted to about 37 per cent of registered voters.
We now know that the electoral registers of the time were not fully updated, and omitted a good many vote-entitled people. Allowing for that, about a third of vote-entitled people voted ‘leave.’
Few countries would accept such a slender minority of their vote-entitled population as being sufficient to make such a major constitutional change as Brexit entails, and it is an exaggeration to describe that slender minority as ‘the British People’.
One last point: The continual use of unfounded assertions and slogans as a substitute for legitimate argument, has had the effect of whipping up much unjustified and dangerous malice. A number of MPs now report having received (sometimes multiple) death threats, and one MP has even been advised by the police not to go back to the constituency this weekend. That is not the sign of a civilised country.
John Tippler
Spalding
