Violent language must be avoided while expressing anger over Brexit

Colin Randall highlights the latest twists and turns in Brexit

Britons demonstrate against the UK's decision to leave the EU, in central London. Paul Hackett / Reuters

To hysterical sections of the right-wing British press, the high court decision that parliamentary approval was needed to trigger the process implementing withdrawal from the European Union was a scandalous betrayal of democracy.

Enemies of the people, screamed the Daily Mail banner headline beneath a rogues’ gallery of the three bewigged judges it held responsible for this outrage.

They are, of course, nothing of the sort. They made a judgment based on their interpretation of the law, expressly avoiding any view on the merits or demerits of leaving the EU.

That, in a nation where the judiciary has always acted as a useful, often vital bulwark against all manner of abuses, is precisely how it should be.

Anyone with the most rudimentary grasp of UK law knows the issue does not begin and end there. Contentious high court decisions routinely go to appeal, and are frequently overturned. Theresa May’s government has duly appealed and the case will be heard by the supreme court next month.

But the ugliness of responses to last Thursday’s first round rightly appals fair-minded observers everywhere. It is also, sadly, typical of the unpleasantness into which public debate has degenerated since the June 23 referendum, itself following an unedifying campaign of dubious claims and counterclaims, which produced its unexpected vote.

Nor is the poisonous nature of the rhetoric confined to those who clamoured for Brexit and want the result – just under 52 per cent in a high turnout voting to leave – acted upon with minimum delay. There has been plenty of snarling from unhappy Remainers, too, if rarely on the scale seen from some pro-Leave elements since the high court ruling.

There may be nothing wrong, in itself, with being a bad loser. It just depends on how disappointment is expressed.

But then I am among those bad losers. While unconvinced the EU has all the answers to a continent’s pressing problems, from the economy to immigration, I prefer to be part of the solution, not to choose exclusion from it.

It was in my own north-eastern region of England that early results showed the extent to which Brexit had popular support. Sunderland voted with a 61 per cent slice of the poll for withdrawal, an astonishing gamble given the city’s dependence on European influences for jobs and grants.

The car manufacturer Nissan has now ended fears, which its own pronouncement had helped to fuel, that investment in its plant just outside the city would be harmed if Britain opted for an uncertain trading future. Production of Qashqai and X-Trail SUV models will be centred there. No matter that it took unspecified government “support and assurances” to sway Nissan; 7,000 direct jobs and thousands more indirect ones are protected and that is a heart-warming fillip for a beleaguered corner of Britain.

Among friends in the area are those who voted for Brexit and those who wanted to stay. The former now demand that the latter apologise for “crucifying Sunderland and the north in general, claiming Nissan would leave the national economy in a slump”. Remainers counter that Nissan jobs were saved not because of Brexit, but despite. And while share values have flourished, sterling has taken a hammering, financial institutions talk of deserting London to relocate abroad and no one any longer believes £350 million of taxpayers’ money channelled each week to Europe will magically find its way into the cash-strapped national health service. That promise evaporated by breakfast time the morning after the referendum as the nation awoke to the realities of what it had voted for.

There can be respectable and robustly expressed differences on such issues. But they should surely stop short of the violent and abusive language that has become all too commonplace.

A former attorney general, Dominic Grieve, says the venomous reaction to the high court judgment “started to make one think one was living in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe”.

On the other side, it has become the mantra of embittered remainers to lay blame for Brexit at the doors of older people whose own financial security and social welfare may be unthreatened by departure, leaving the young to pick up the bill in years to come as the effects of withdrawal bite. The impression is given that only the seriously stupid, easily misled and selfish, along with out-and-out racists could possibly have taken such a decision. This is a blatant distortion even if it is probably true that while not all Brexit voters are racists, all racists are pro-Brexit.

In a decent society, there should be no room for the sort of “mob psyche” of which Grieve speaks. It brings shame on the country without getting close to settling legitimate argument.

For the record, I suspect the supreme court will overturn the high court judgment. Even if it does not, parliament is hugely unlikely to risk the wrath of a majority of voters.

The referendum is a blunt instrument. This one was unnecessary and its result, for many, unwelcome. But damaging as I still consider it will be, I am not such a bad loser that I cannot grudgingly accept it as a clear if flawed expression of popular will.

Colin Randall is a former executive editor of The National