The past few years in politics have seen many events that could be described as watersheds, not least the EU referendum result, David Cameron\u2019s subsequent resignation, or the exit poll that showed Theresa May had miscalled the general election in 2017. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The exit poll in the last month that secured Brexit and perhaps ushered in another decade of Conservative rule will doubtless conclude many documentaries in future. But a more satisfying event for me was the quiet unwinding of the People\u2019s Vote campaign, its communications director Tom Baldwin telling the Guardian <\/em>last week<\/a>, \u201cThere\u2019s no chance of stopping Brexit now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve been happy to tell anybody that would listen that the campaign to overturn the referendum result was a very bad idea<\/a>. While progressives were carping about Brexit giving licence to all sorts of nasty bigots, many prominent politicians were openly campaigning to nullify a democratic vote because they didn\u2019t like the result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s false to say nobody cared about this. Some remainer MPs were harangued as \u201ctraitors\u201d in the street. Boris Johnson\u2019s calling anti-no deal legislation a \u201csurrender bill\u201d cast parliamentary opponents as betraying the British interest. On the milder side, the Irish podcaster Steve Byrne called the People\u2019s Vote campaign \u201ca bit off<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet many others celebrated the people trying to block Brexit. Journalists applauded the formation of the often renamed Independent Group from a bloc of dissatisfied Labour and Conservative MPs. Podcasts and newspapers were formed, and hundreds of thousands marched to stop Brexit happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is nothing innately malign in people organising in these ways to campaign for something. But what these people were campaigning for was the erasure of a democratic vote with a clear if narrow verdict. They were campaigning for democracy to be ignored. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Various sophistries were available to justify this. Polling has largely indicated that if Brits were again asked about EU membership we would vote remain (usual health warnings about polls aside). Vote Leave broke some rules during the election, and wrote some dubious things on a coach. And perhaps, some argued, Britons should never have been asked in the first place<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That the referendum was flawed is not in question, but the fact remains it was authorised by Parliament and the sitting government, and politicians agreed the result would be implemented. The gripes about overspending or the power of internet advertising are also frivolous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More fundamentally, the view that voters are incapable of choosing whether to be governed by the EU is more disgraceful than anything leavers have been accused of. It is a political philosophy that refuses to let people run their own lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now those bastards have lost. They\u2019ve lost because a new parliamentary majority has taken back control of politics, with Johnson at its head. The leverage afforded to the anti-democrats by the hung parliament formed in 2017 is no more. These people will have to abide by the wishes of most voters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n