As tens of thousands prepare to march through the street’s of London on Saturday to rage against Brexit and demand a “people’s vote”, they should spare at least a thought for those who have been raging in towns and villages across our nation for decades. People for whom the Brexit vote itself was a once in a lifetime chance to be heard and, for a moment, take back control. Of course people should demonstrate to change events as they see fit, democracy is always an on-going conversation, never a full stop. But Brexit was the biggest democratic revolution of our life times and any attempt to overturn it must be handled with incredible care.
The bottom line is this, how we get out of this mess must be more democratic than how we got into it. That isn’t just democracy as rule of the majority but the plural search for shared assumptions, meaning and purpose – in a better future for all of us precisely because it is negotiated and not imposed.
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