Brexit - a plea to Parliament - updated

I'm sure you have seen that a couple of polls give the Brexit Party a decent chance of winning the Euro-elections. (My guess: it will come second to Labour.)

How do you feel about seeing Farage back in the news? Probably not too happy. We'd all hoped he was out of politics forever.

Well, this was all utterly predictable - and it was predicted. See this from November 2018: 

"A botched Brexit will draw renewed attention to the void between voters and the political class, which has been exposed but not closed by the referendum. The general consequence of this void is the rise of populist movements, which attract voters by pointing to this disconnect, and promising that they will smash the entrenched, corrupted “elite” and ensure that “the people” are heard once more. Populist mobilisation can be used for either “left-wing” or “right-wing” purposes, or even both simultaneously, though right-wing populism is most common in contemporary Europe. Indeed, it is rampant across the continent, thanks to the void entrenched by European integration. Right-wing populists have captured state power in Austria (the Freedom Party), Hungary (Orban’s Fidesz party) and Italy (the Lega and the Five Star Movement), while polling at second place in countries like Denmark (the Danish People’s Party), France (the National Front) and Germany (Alternative for Germany). This is not a random coincidence. It is a structural feature of the European Union.

Thanks to the Brexit referendum, Britain is temporarily inoculated from this terrible disease. In the preceding decades, voters who had been effectively disenfranchised by the convergence of the mainstream parties flirted first with the British National Party and then the UK Independence Party, in a desperate attempt to compel the establishment to listen to them. The EU referendum allowed these citizens – and many who felt so marginalised that they had never voted before – to express their disgust. Having apparently disciplined political leaders by rejecting the EU, they promptly abandoned UKIP, just as they had previously dropped the BNP. Contrary to [...] widespread Remainer predictions of some sort of post-referendum “Faragist” or even “fascist” takeover in “Weimar Britain”, UKIP’s vote collapsed in the 2017 general election.[...] Since the referendum, UKIP has also been through four leaders, lost its only MP and many councillors, and has been abandoned by its major donors.

The referendum therefore offered the British political elite a golden opportunity to restore representative democracy, neutralising the populist threat for good. ... [It] signalled to politicians that they must represent the voters again, and gave them the opportunity to do so, thereby closing the void. Unlike the Continent, where traditional parties have been all but wiped out in countries like Italy and France, displaced by populist upstarts of the right and the “extreme centre”, in the 2017 general election the two main parties gained their strongest support in decades, reversing a longstanding trend of political fragmentation. The UK’s populist party was decimated, while Labour became Europe’s most successful social democratic party. With Corbyn’s “old Labour” platform, real political contestation seemed to be back, at long last. Remainers’ predictions could not have been more wrong, though few acknowledge it.

This opportunity for democratic renewal now risks being missed entirely, with grave consequences. Any attempt to overtly overturn the referendum result, through a second referendum or similar, will result in the rapid resurgence of British populism. Either UKIP will be revived, or something similar will emerge. Its leaders will have concrete proof that, regardless of how you vote, the political establishment will not listen to you. The only alternative is to support a force willing to smash the lot of them. We do not have to imagine what this would look like: we need only look to the Continent.

Crucially, if this happens, this will primarily be the fault of Remainers, not Brexit. [...] If and when there is a right-wing populist resurgence, these very same individuals will declare: “See, we told you so – Brexit is about racist populism!” In reality, Brexit was a golden opportunity to lance this boil by closing the political void. It is the intransigence and myopia of the British left that is squandering this opportunity." 

I disagree in part: the political right is pretty bad too. Moreover, pretty much everything that pro-Brexit MPs have been up to recently amply justifies Dominic Cummings' desire to keep them locked in a dark dungeon during any political campaign.

Let's pause for a moment to note that we should be proud of our political culture: Farage is not a fascist, and he gets popularity precisely from being not a fascist.

But just for a moment. Because we need to go on to ask: who (or what) comes after Farage? There's surely only so much that some people will take before they despair of Farage's attempts to do things by the book and turn to people who don't care about the book. 

You see that phrase: "concrete proof that, regardless of how you vote, the political establishment will not listen to you". This is my plea to our politicians: don't give us that proof! Leave and then campaign to re-join the EU - if being outside the EU is that bad then we will be desperate to rejoin (the EU seems reluctant to let us go, after all)! Brexit In Name Only, as soft a Brexit as you like! But please, please don't do to the people of the UK what you would never have done to the people of Scotland: do not reverse their referendum. If you care about democracy, if you care about legitimacy, if you really care about being tough on fascism and tough on the causes of fascism, please please please do not do what you are thinking of doing, what we can all see that you want to do - do not  undermine the result of a referendum.

UPDATE: Lord Falconer (posting from Beverly Hills!) agrees with me. Read the replies he patiently provides to a large number of people making the obvious points in response.

UPPERDATE: And so does Philip Collins in the Times. This is really not rocket science.