Parliamentarians: vote down Brexit!

We must call on our MPs to vote Brexit down. Among many other reasons (I have more: please do ask):

Cameron shamefully called the EU Referendum for the short-term benefit of the Conservative Party not the long-term benefit of the nation, including the integrity of the United Kingdom itself.

No respectable organisation - not even a ballroom dancing club let alone a major nation of 60 million people - would let a constitutional change of this size and future impact be decided by a simple majority of those who turned out to vote.

Enormous lies and deceptions were perpetrated and admitted by both sides: the campaign wasn't a sign of democracy but a dispiriting insult to it.

Lies told by the demagogues of the winning side became clear within hours of the result, as did their desire to quit the field once they'd surprised themselves by winning and now feared having to see it through.

Many Leave voters did so out of ignorance, anger, fear, and a desire to hit back at political and economic classes by whom they felt betrayed. Their scapegoat was - as so often in history - foreigners. A referendum of this kind and about this specific question is no place for such a protest vote, however justified their anger might be.

3 million people who'd never bothered to vote before did so on 23rd June and nearly all voted Leave. This swung it. Leavers have no right to lecture the rest of us about democracy if so many couldn't even be bothered until now to cast a vote for which others fought and died.

Unlike Hitler's Germany, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and many other corrupt and brutal countries down the years, Britain isn't a plebiscitary democracy. That is one of the things of which we should be most proud and should defend rather than undermine: we elect MPs as representatives not delegates. The referendum result is not binding and there is nothing unconstitutional in throwing it out.

MPs should now stand up and terminate this mean farce. They should forget both their personal careers and their party's fortunes. They need to do it for the nation and to explain carefully and fully why.

I'm supporting, joining and getting directly and practically involved with people who think the same way. We all know that the Brexit campaign lost the argument even if it (only just) called out the vote; we must now defend, restate, redouble and massively extend the narrowly economic argument for remaining which so badly neglected the real cultural issues at stake.

The biggest - and I think decisive - challenge will be to make clear that most of the things which caused the anger behind June 23rd's protest vote were not due to the European Union. Rather, they happened on the watch of the very class of politicians who now stand to benefit from it, and against whom that anger should now be constructively directed.

As a song goes, if you tolerate this, then your children will be next.

Or, simpler, the decent internationalist message of 1936: ¡No pasaran!