A People’s Vote is no substitute for an effective opposition

Sympathetic journalists covering the Remain movement are stuck by how far away it is from the ugliness of politics. Its activists are, to use a word that damns with faint praise, ‘nice’. It is better to be nice than vicious, of course. It is better to be nice than mendacious and unscrupulous and so criminally irresponsible you would burn down the whole country rather than admit to a mistake. But, we liberal reporters flinch at the sight of all the niceness. The nice never win a war, we think. Nice gets you nowhere in modern Britain.

When we ask how they will deal with thugs and manipulators of the calibre of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, they quote Michelle Obama and say, ‘When they go low, we go high’. When we ask who will lead a second remain campaign, they talk about then need to find ‘diverse voices’ from outside the old political world.