It was supposed to be so easy

With the country voting by a clear majority for remain candidates in last week’s EU elections, I find my own position, as per usual, wracked with contradictions. I voted for a solidly remain party, the Lib Dems, who believe in a second referendum. If it hadn’t been the Lib Dems, it would have been the Greens or the dying embers (sorry, but it’s true) of Change UK, who stand for the same thing. But I don’t quite support a second referendum. Why do I find myself in this position?

God knows I shouldn’t, given the crooked nature of the 2016 referendum, where we were consistently and persistently lied to by the shysters and hucksters of the hard right. I am sure the lies and false promises had a material effect on the result of the referendum, otherwise why did they go to such much trouble? The leaders of the leave campaign are sure their cleverly directed propaganda worked.

My issue is the one of patronising those who voted leave. As someone with a single O level (ask your parents, kids) to my name, I am not in the best position to patronise people by telling them they were too dim to realise they were being taken for a ride by Farage and Johnson, even though I find it hard to avoid the thought that some people were taken for a ride. When asking leavers why they wanted to leave and then asking them how they would personally benefit, I have never had one positive answer. However, I am loathe to be over critical. A vote is still a vote, even when it’s potentially crooked.

The Labour people who argue strongly that we should not have a second referendum, the likes of Stephen Kinnock, Gloria Di Piero and Lucy Powell, don’t convince me either, even though I probably agree with them. Cynically, I suspect they are more keen on keeping their own jobs in the House of Commons rather than those of their constituents. Either way, I’m in a strange place. I seem to support no one.

I suppose I could live with the softest of soft Brexits, a kind of Norway on steroids that would preserve as many of the benefits of EU membership as possible. Combined with that, the country needs a full, independent public inquiry into the conduct of the first referendum. Let’s get everything into the open. Where did all the money come from for the leave campaigns? Was there Russian involvement? What, if any, were the links to the so called American ‘alt-right’? Having left the EU as part of a soft Brexit, we would await the outcome of the inquiry and if it turned out there was criminal activity a second referendum would be required.

For all that, the sight of the tobacco stained man frog Nigel Farage prancing and preening all over the media makes me wonder if I’m right after all. Farage’s agenda is more than just Brexit now. He is the leader of English nationalism, of the small state, low tax, unfettered capitalism loved by the hard right.

Perhaps, it’s insoluble? Perhaps, the EU is our own Hotel California where we can check out but never leave? Either way, the country remains divided and will remain divided for the unforeseeable future. I’ll stick with Norway on steroids as something I can live with. Anything worse than that, I’ll probably end up, very reluctantly, in the second referendum camp, even though I disagree in principle having referendums for anything.

One thing is for sure: carry on with Brexit and we have another decade of division and uncertainty. The withdrawal agreement is the easy bit. We either do it by crashing the economy with no deal, we leave with the softest of Brexits, which will still leave us worse off, or we don’t leave at all. If only the people who led us to this place, from David Cameron who fired the starting gun to Farage, Johnson, Davis, Fox et al who told us it would all be so easy. Nothing could have been further from the truth.