If Peter Mandelson’s old stamping ground turns blue then seats like Doncaster North (held by Ed Miliband) and Normanton (held by Yvette Cooper) will be next. That should concentrate minds.

Yet with the Downing Street clown show doing its best to sabotage the Conservative campaign, it could still be Boris on the ropes by Monday, not Sir Keir, and that would be an absolute disaster… for the Labour Party. If voters deliver a mixed message, then Labour won’t understand it.

Mind you, it might not understand an unmixed message. Just look at 2019. No fewer than 50 Red Wall seats turned blue at the General Election, but who did Labour replace Jeremy Corbyn with? A middle-class, southern Remainer who devised the party’s disastrous second referendum policy. Brilliant.

So don’t blame the voters if they have to repeat themselves. The first home truth that needs to get through loud and clear is the most obvious: Labour is useless at picking leaders.

A party leader has to satisfy two fundamental tests — one positive, the other negative. He (and with Labour it always is a he) has to be sufficiently attractive while also not excessively repulsive. No Labour leader has passed both tests since Tony Blair was elected 27 years ago; none of them have won a general election.

While Sir Keir passes the negative test, it’s increasingly clear that he fails the positive test. With Jeremy Corbyn it was the other way round, hugely loveable to a core of voters and extremely off-putting to the rest. Ed Miliband satisfied neither test and nor, by the end, did Gordon Brown.

So the most immediate way in which an electoral calamity would be good for Labour is forcing a choice of new leader on the basis of electability and electability alone. The membership might just be up for that, the favourite now being Andy Burnham — the former Cabinet minister and current Mayor of Greater Manchester.

In 2015, Burnham was decisively rejected by Labour members in favour of Jeremy Corbyn, who outpolled him three-to-one; if he’s now the front runner that’s quite the turnaround. Then again, if party members are willing to go back the future they might as well go the extra mile — and consider a candidate like Dan Jarvis.

A former British Army officer, Jarvis is the current Mayor of the Sheffield City Region. Unlike Burnham, he’s also a sitting MP — for Barnsley Central, a surviving chunk of the Red Wall. This is a constituency where the Brexit Party took 30% of the vote in 2019, less than four thousand votes behind Labour.

How on Earth did that happen?

Labour won’t find the answers until they accept a second home truth, which is that Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer are equal co-authors of the party’s misfortune.

The heated debate between the Corbynites and Starmerites as to which side is to blame overlooks the possibility that they both are. Labour is polarised between two kinds of wrong and unelectable — the tendencies represented by Momentum on the one hand and the People’s Vote campaign on the other. Both are failed projects, and they’ve left Labour revolving uselessly around an axis of feeble. The party cannot make progress until it declares both groups a busted flush and moves on.

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Dan Jarvis hinted at just such a need in a recent essay for the Fabian Society pamphlet, Hearts and Minds: Winning the working-class vote:

“We would be naïve to think that changes at the top of the party and an end to the Brexit wars mean an automatic return to business as usual,” he wrote: “The political landscape has shifted, we must adapt or risk fading into obscurity like some of our sister parties on the continent.”

But what would that require? Jarvis pleads with his party to “better understand how notions such as patriotism, sovereignty and national security relate to people’s lived experiences.” He also observes that “local and regional pride is accepted, celebrated, even encouraged, but when the discussion moves to national pride, many in our party begin to feel uneasy.”

That’s putting it mildly. When Starmer tried to wrap himself in the Union Jack, parts of his party freaked out. It could have been his opportunity to face down those who see our national flag as symbol of hate and racism, but he clearly doesn’t have the stomach for a fight.

The Jarvis solution is to acknowledge the bad parts of our national history — “the Britain of empire and conquest”, as he puts it, while celebrating “the Britain of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the miners’ strike.” But are enough voters interested in this brand of Old Labour nostalgia?

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The Lefties at the heart of government

By Peter Franklin

Matthew Parris has dismissed the Labour movement as “a gluey, opaque, illiberal freemasonry of bonkers activists, passive supporters, historical resentments, myths and legend.” Labour, he feels, is an impediment to change: “21st-century Britain will never warm to this 20th-century dinosaur, waving its banners of extinct mining unions.”

Labour’s predicament is that Jarvis and Parris are equally right and wrong. Much of the middle-class Left has no interest in Jarvis’s patriotic socialism and much of the working class has no interest in what Parris stands for. Without both sets of voters there is no path to power for the Left, yet Labour is clearly incapable of bringing them together in sufficient numbers.

And that leads us to the third, and most difficult, home truth that the party has to accept: it can’t defeat the Tories alone.

Britain today has only one major party — the Conservatives. They can be beaten, but only by an alliance of smaller parties, of which Labour would be the obviously leading member. Not splitting the non-Tory vote is hardly a new idea, but this latest incarnation of the “progressive alliance” would also serve a more radical purpose: the unbundling of the Labour Party.

It’s clear that Labour will never retake the Red Wall unless its leadership is free to develop a moderate and patriotic platform – and this can’t be done with either the Corbynites or the hardcore Remainers on board.

In order to persuade them to leave, the Labour leader needs make them an offer they can’t refuse — an electorally viable future outside Labour. Under our current voting system, Labour would stand aside to give other progressive parties a free run in a defined number of constituencies, concentrated in the big cities and university towns.

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By Tanya Gold

If this works — if Labour retakes the Red Wall and a progressive alliance gains a majority — then that still leaves the problem of reconciling the difference stripes of leftish opinion. But this would be less painful as part of a negotiation to form a government than as a bitter factional struggle within one party.

Denmark provides an example of how it can work. There, the main centre-left party are the Social Democrats, who govern with the support of several smaller progressive groups. Under Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Social Democrats have gained support by combining welfarist policies with a tough line on immigration and national security. Whatever one might think of these policies, they’re electorally successful — and the rest of the Left goes along with it. Indeed Denmark is one of the last places in western European with a significant centre-left to speak of.

But can we really imagine Labour embarking upon such a radically different future? Yes — but only if it has no other option, and knows it faces oblivion. Given a choice between seizing the day or clutching at straws, it will always go for the straws. It’s easier, it’s less painful, and it’s ultimately disastrous. If Labour are humiliated today, it will be the wake-up call they need.

“False consciousness” gets a lot of bad press these days, and you can see why: it’s a foundational concept of Marxist-Leninist communism, originally formulated by Friedrich Engels, and it can easily be seen as a way of blaming the idiot proles for not knowing what’s best for them and voting for the wrong lot. There is something a bit grim about telling working-class people — or black people, or gay people, or women, et cetera — that the only reason they voted the way they did is because they are idiots who got duped.

It’s much easier, and probably more vote-winning, to go the other way, and declare that you “trust the British people”. Figures as diametrically opposed as Jacob Rees-Mogg and People’s Vote UK have both used that phrase in recent months: we trust the British people (and the answer they already gave us); we trust the British people (so let’s ask them again). The electorate is always right; in some formulations, they are guardians of a quasi-mystical knowledge and wisdom, and can see through the lies and machinations of duplicitous politicians to the deep truths beneath.

It’s probably a bit simplistic to boil this all down to “can the electorate be wrong?”, but that’s what I’m going to do. And I’d say of course they can — be wrong, and be deceived. They are not holy repositories of the ancient truths. It’s just that there’s another, equally important, sense, in which they are necessarily and tautologically right, and that fact needs to be acknowledged too.

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Why Corbynistas can never admit they're wrong

By Tom Chivers

There are two important ways in which the electorate could be “wrong”: they could vote against their own interests, and they could vote in ways that are morally faulty. It seems obvious that both of those things are possible. According to YouGov, 33% of all richer “ABC1” voters voted Labour, 43% Tory; 33% of poorer “C2DE” voters voted Labour, 48% Tory. Sure, not all C2DE voters or all ABC1 voters are alike, and there were divisions by age, ethnicity and sex as well. But for every Labour voter, there will almost certainly have been a Tory voter whose material and financial interests would have been near-identical. One of them must have been making the worse choice, from a purely selfish point of view.

The other way is if they can vote immorally. And again, of course they can, assuming that we agree that morality exists in some form. There was no referendum on slavery in 1800, but if there had been, most British voters might well have voted to maintain it. In that hypothetical referendum, most of us would say that the British electorate was unambiguously morally wrong.

And of course they can be deceived into being wrong, whether by the billionaire press or the lying politicians. For the record I think the actual impact of the media on voting habits is gigantically overstated. But it is still real.

But there is another sense in which the voters cannot be wrong, and that is an algorithmic one. The basic idea is that their votes are inputted into a big machine called British Democracy, they whirr around inside it, passing through little gates called “constituencies” and “first past the post” and “majority”, and they return an output of “Tory government” (usually).

By analogy: if you watch a game of football, one team can have lots of chances, all the possession, play the best football, generally be better. You could say they deserve to win, in one sense; “on the balance of play”, it would be the “wrong” outcome for them to lose. But if they fail to score and the other team nicks a grim own-goal at their only corner of the game in the 87th minute, then they will lose. The algorithm for determining the winning team is: Let A equal goals for Team A; let B equal goals for Team B; if A>B then Team A is the winner. That output can only be “wrong” if there is literal cheating; Calciopoli, that sort of thing.

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Of course biological sex exists

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Similarly, the outcome of a democratic vote can only be “wrong” if there is literal vote-tampering or other illegal behaviour. There have been accusations of such — the Tories worry about vote-stuffing, Labour about Cambridge Analytica — but I think they’re largely silly, and certainly not enough to have significantly changed this month’s thrashing.

If the electoral system returns something that doesn’t look “fair”, such as Donald Trump or George W. Bush winning the electoral college despite losing the popular vote, or the Tories getting one MP per 37,000 votes and the Lib Dems getting one seat per 350,000, then that’s just what the algorithm returns. It may be that you can convince people to rewrite the algorithm, but — under the system — it’s the correct output. It is tautologically true that what the electorate elects is elected.

Arguing over what is “fair” or “deserved” is a lot more fun than arguing over the outcome, obviously, because it’s subjective and thus can be argued about forever. That’s why football phone-ins are full of people saying that the better team lost or that VAR got it wrong, rather than arguing that in fact the score was 2-1 not 0-1 and everyone else has simply misread the numbers. Hence the great big row we’re having now, and articles like this one.

Where does all this get us? Well: obviously, voters can be “wrong”. There’s a whole subset of the electorate called “low-information voters”. God knows I don’t blame them; keeping up with political news is boring, is hard work, and does very limited good in the world. But still, I don’t imagine they do much better than chance at working out what the “right” vote would be. Once you throw in media misinformation — deliberate or otherwise — it would honestly surprise me if a large majority of voters got it “right” by any single metric you happen to choose. I would be totally unsurprised to learn that I got it “wrong”. And voters can be immoral, because, you know, people.

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But they are still the inputs to the algorithm that you have to work with. This is the sense in which they cannot be wrong, and complaining that they have false consciousness or have voted against their interests or are all “entitled, embittered, sneering nasty selfish racist foul fuckwits” is missing the point. It’s like complaining that the goals are too small or the pitch is too wide. You have the electorate you have.

Again, imagine an 1800 referendum on slavery. If you had tried to win such a referendum by saying “we ought to impose laws mandating equal-opportunity hiring practices and push for black people to be proportionally represented”, you would have been laughed at. It might, though, have been possible to win by saying something that, to modern ears, is obviously and hideously racist — perhaps that black people and white people can never live “on terms of social and political equality”, as Abraham Lincoln would say a few decades later, but that they should not be enslaved.

That is not the best moral outcome, but it is better than the available alternative; the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. By comparison, I would personally vote for a party that offered 100% open borders and zero restrictions on immigration. I think that would be the best thing for humanity in general. But it is obviously unacceptable to the electorate, so I look for the party with the least draconian immigration stance and — all else being equal — I vote for that. I think the voters are wrong, but they’re the voters we have.

Labour may be right that large parts of the electorate voted against their interests; or that large parts of the electorate are racist or homophobic, howsoever defined. It may be that a perfectly moral electorate, or one that knew exactly what its interests were, would have voted Labour in a huge landslide, with only Arron Banks, Mike Ashley and the ghost of Bernard Manning voting for the Tories. Maybe they’re not out of touch; maybe it is, indeed, the voters who are wrong.

But at the moment those are the voters we have. Call it “false consciousness” or whatever you like, but arguing that you have the wrong sort of voter is precisely as silly as stopping mid-match to demand that you should be allowed to use your hands.

However, while none of this resurgent traditionalism is exactly up my street, being as I am of a decidedly more liberal persuasion, I don’t see it as the biggest threat to democracy. Having considered the issue for the better part of my life, I believe that the biggest threat to democracy is the belief among the current societal elite that what they want and what democracy is are the same thing – and that tweaking the rules of the game to get what you want is therefore right, just and somehow unto itself democratic.

This trend that sees democracy as a set of particular decisions, rather than just as a method for making decisions, has been well under way for some time and tends to divide the world between ‘informed’, ‘correct’ decisions, and ‘uninformed’ ‘incorrect’ decisions. ‘Correct’ decisions are automatically democratic; ‘incorrect’ ones are not.

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By Peter Franklin

One of the ways that is currently in vogue for ensuring ‘informed’, ‘correct’ decisions is to hold so-called citizens’ assemblies, a democratic ‘innovation’ that many leaders currently feel assured will bring them the results that they want.

You may have heard of citizen assemblies. They are all the rage in academic circles and some of that has seeped out into the political sphere. Conservative politician Rory Stewart proposed one to ‘bridge the gap between the referendum result and parliament’ on Brexit, for example, and Extinction Rebellion has demanded that a binding assembly be held on how the UK can tackle climate change and ecological justice.

For the uninitiated, citizens’ assemblies, or citizens’ juries as they are sometimes called, consist of randomly selected people who are gathered to listen to presentations from academics and interest groups, generally over the course of a few weekends, and then to make legislative recommendations or (according to some variants) legislate directly themselves. University College London held such an assembly on the topic of Brexit in 2017 and its 50 members decided that their vision for Brexit included ‘a bespoke UK/EU trade deal and a customs union that would allow the UK to conduct its own international trade policy while maintaining a frictionless UK/EU border’, but that if a deal could not be reached, they would choose to remain in the single market and customs union.

Since then, citizens’ assemblies have been a firm favourite among some Remainers, as a way to ‘break deadlock’ over Brexit and get people to make ‘considered’ decisions. They contrast this to the 2016 Brexit referendum Leave vote, which they view as the result of ill-considered or unconsidered votes and which is therefore, according to some, essentially undemocratic.

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What Rory Stewart got right

By Freddie Sayers

Touted as a participatory breakthrough that empowers the average voter, there are a lot of myths circling about citizens’ assemblies – and particularly about those that have been held in Ireland. British politicians and intellectuals apparently feel themselves entitled to just blithely repeat these myths as a justification for holding such assemblies on all manner of decisions in Britain.

The favoured narrative is that prior to 2018 the Irish were a mess of conflicting ideas on the issue of liberalising the country’s restrictive abortion laws (according to Extinction Rebellion we had, in fact, reached ‘deadlock’ on this issue). Then, mercy of mercies, the government called a citizens’ assembly in which ordinary, randomly-selected people were finally ‘informed’, revolutionising our understanding of abortion and leading to the obviously correct move to liberalise abortion law in our long and unidirectional march to enlightenment.

This transformative goodness could happen for Brexit and Climate Change, too.

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Now, one of the more grievous errors with this understanding is that it confuses electoral gridlock (which is pretty much the status quo on most things) with citizen gridlock, which per definition is only possible if you have an even number of voters who are exactly divided on a topic – a circumstance that I have no example of ever occurring in real life.

The ‘division’ on abortion in Ireland was, for some time, between a sizeable majority of pro-choice voters on one hand and a minority of pro-life voters on the other. The minority, being conservative, generally give their votes to one of the two major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, and they are vocal about where their priorities lie. They will, for example, explicitly tell politicians that they, regretfully, cannot vote for anyone who is pro-choice. I know, because I ran in the 2016 election, and plenty of people said it to me, a few of them even being so kind as to pray for my soul.

Parliamentary seats in Ireland are often won by very few votes and each of the big parties boasted a certain contingent of potentially single-issue pro-life voters. For this reason, neither party wanted to touch the issue – no candidate wants to lose 10% of their vote share because their pro-life voters stay at home. They simply can’t afford to, despite the fact that 10% (or 30% for that matter) is clearly not a majority. This is how blocking minorities work in electoral systems on all kinds of issues. It tells you absolutely nothing about what the majority of citizens think and thus cannot be used as a proxy for inferring citizen gridlock, ignorance or confusion.

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What's so illiberal about debating abortion?

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

Having lived here for over a dozen years, I would say that the number of people who were in favour of liberalising abortion was certainly over 50% and actually closer to around 2/3 for some time – a supermajority, in other words. When I ran a digital democracy exercise asking people to tell me their stance on abortion two years before it was put to the vote, 68% said that a referendum should be held in order to loosen the laws, while some polls put the numbers in favour of liberalisation as high as 80%.

The citizens’ assembly that debated the pros and cons of removing the 8^th amendment (the Constitutional provision that made liberalisation impossible) was not called by people who were devoted to liberalising abortion laws and felt the need to ‘educate’ the populace over to their point of view. Many of the more outspoken pro-choice politicians wanted a referendum to be called at the earliest convenient point because public opinion was already in their favour. If you peruse the parliamentary records you will see that sentiment clearly reflected in the debate on the citizens’ assembly regarding abortion. The citizens’ assembly delayed the referendum by a few years and helped the major parties mitigate the damage with their pro-life voters by allowing them to distance themselves from the entire process.

Thus, the principle in operation in Ireland on abortion was a completely different one than is the case regarding Brexit in the UK. In Ireland, a blocking minority was using the electoral process to punch above its weight, ensure that its votes de facto counted more than those of others and keep abortion off the agenda. Whereas the pivotal issue in regards to Brexit is that there was a majority vote in a referendum that neither parliament nor the losing side accepts.

The Irish assembly and subsequent referendum de facto circumvented the pro-life minority by implementing direct democracy on this issue. Remainers want to use an assembly in Britain to try to circumvent a majority by taking a direct democratic decision and somehow befuddling it via assembly.

This is a very different kind of ‘deadlock’ and I would like to stress that it is not a good idea to start using things like citizens’ assemblies to try to circumvent clearly expressed majority will, because in doing so you are setting a precedent for circumventing democracy whenever you don’t like it. And anyone can play that game.

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The other myth about Ireland is that the citizens’ assembly had a major impact on the outcome and quality of the abortion referendum that followed it and that had the Brexit referendum (or other issues) benefited from something similar, the post-Brexit debate would not be so embittered.

According to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown writing in The Guardian:

‘The handling of the Irish abortion referendum is evidence of the power and potential of citizens’ assemblies. It could have been a bitter and toxic debate dominated by extremists on both sides. But in part because a representative group – half initially pro-abortion, half against – talked the issues through, exploring differences, asking questions of experts and interacting with each other on their fears and hopes, they managed to defuse the controversies. And they found common ground between devout faith and resolute feminism in an outcome that astonished the world and that everyone accepted.’

Now, part of what Brown said is point-blank invention – Assembly members were not selected according to their views on abortion. That’s just something he made up.

However, leaving that aside, while I realize this may be hard for British people to accept, because your media has conditioned you to believe that we’re all running around with ArmaLites 24/7, Ireland’s pretty chill. Having lived through it, I’m not sure there was anything unusually polite or reasonable about the abortion referendum. As a small country, we are rife with both extreme nepotism and the kind of stifling small-town behaviour-policing that liberals claim to hate so much. For better or worse, it has a suppressing effect on histrionics.

There have been 13 referenda since I moved here and while most of them were not preceded by a citizens’ assembly, they have all been similarly low-key. An effect of the kind Brown proposes is hard to discern.

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Beyond that, a further reason as to why the citizens’ assembly had little (possibly zero) effect on the tone of the debate was that many Irish people weren’t aware that the assembly existed. I canvassed regularly for a yes vote in the referendum and during that time I explicitly addressed the issue of the citizens’ assembly with the hundreds of people I spoke to. Although the vast majority of those people had already made up their minds on how they would vote (unsurprising since abortion has been a live topic of debate for, as one woman put it to me, ‘forty years’), very, very few even dimly recognized the term ‘citizens’ assembly’ even when I prompted them.

And I wasn’t exactly shocked at that – only 100 people out of our 3.3 million voters took part (99 if you exclude the chair). That is one in every 30,000 voters or 0.003% of the voting population. There are approximately 50 million voters in Britain, so a 100-member strong citizens’ assembly would be 0.0002% of the voting population. The numbers involved in citizens’ assemblies are thus extremely low when you think about the total number of voters in the country. 100 people may sound like a lot, but a single tube on the London Victoria line carries 864 passengers. It takes a lot more than a citizens’ assembly to really involve people in political decisions.

Moreover, having belaboured the abortion issue on primetime television, talk radio and newspapers up and down the land for years, few people decided to glue themselves to YouTube to watch videos of citizens’ assembly presentations in order to ‘inform’ themselves. Many citizens’ assembly YouTube videos have little more than 100 views, with even the most controversial ones garnering fewer than 10,000 views.

Remember, there are 4.5 million people living here and 3.3 million voters. ‘Citizens’ Assembly’, I think we can assume, is not going to be the next ‘Game of Thrones’ hit in terms of viewership.

Ireland’s yes vote is attributable to one fact alone: most Irish people wanted to liberalise abortion, and this trend has been in the works for a long time for a number of different reasons. It is not attributable to a small-scale deliberative democracy experiment that most people were barely, if at all, conscious of, but is supposed nonetheless to have had some dramatic and ennobling effect on public opinion.

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Perhaps even more important, however, is to remember where all this is headed, because some people in Britain seem to forget that the assembly was just a low-key warm-up round for a referendum. This is the biggest and most relevant of all myths – that somehow the citizens’ assembly solved something that a referendum couldn’t and therefore there is some kind of strained relevance to Brexit and other allegedly divisive issues.

The citizens’ assembly, contrary to Brown’s assertions, didn’t reach any kind of a comfy ultimate compromise that everyone could live with at all. They came up with more than a dozen recommendations, but the ultimate and only relevant question was whether or not the 8^th amendment (which restricted abortion) should be repealed, which would allow the houses of parliament to legislate on the issue.

The referendum was ultimately, as it had to be, a straight Yes/No vote, and the pro-lifers turned up for it to the tune of over 700,000 people, nearly one-quarter of the electorate. They wanted to keep the 8^th amendment in – no one ‘compromised’ with them on that.

The idea that life is sacrosanct and should be protected under all circumstances and the idea that humans should, in any way, shape or form, be allowed to make their own choices, including on such topics as termination and euthanasia are not, at the end of the day, compatible.

Democracy isn’t about achieving ends that everyone agrees on or even finds tolerable. That’s impossible. It’s about making choices that everyone is literally forced to abide by because those choices become law, and that law is in turn enforced by police and interpreted by courts. Democracies are intentionally constructed to only require a majority of votes cast. Thus, that one is unhappy with a result is no indicator of its democratic or undemocratic nature.

And personally I believe that is a good thing, because any law depends a great deal on its real or perceived legitimacy and I’m at a loss to understand how that can be achieved without some process that allows each citizen a vote, whether that be directly (my preference) or through voting for elected representatives.

Seeking to get around either of those mechanisms via a citizens’ assembly – involving, in the grand scheme of things, next to no one – means that one is actually setting an absurdly low bar for participation.

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When it comes to legitimacy some citizens’ assembly advocates, especially those who would like to overturn Brexit, seem to wield both this absurdly low bar and an absurdly high one at the same time. If pro-Remain advocates, for example, want to say that a margin of 1.3 million votes was too tight to be decisive – with a 72% turnout of registered voters (or 65% of the entire voting age population) – in the Brexit referendum, I do wonder how a citizens’ assembly resting on only a few people perhaps changing their votes could have any credence.

I also wonder what they’d think of some of our liberalising referenda over here in Ireland.

The 8^th amendment abortion referendum wasn’t the first of those (yet another reason as to why it did not exactly strike as a bolt from the blue).

There is no minimum turn-out required on referendum votes in Ireland. Turn-out for the most recent referendum on reducing the waiting period for divorce was below 51%, while fewer than 44% bothered to vote in the referendum to remove the offence of blasphemy from the Constitution. Ireland’s 1995 divorce referendum passed by a mere 9000 votes (that’s a vote of 50.28% in favour). I’ve learned that Remainers dislike being reminded of these events, especially in response to the allegation that the Brexit vote did not enjoy a clear enough majority. After all, we have often been unable to turn out as clear a victory for some of the outcomes here that they agree with the most.

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The reason these votes are accepted in Ireland, despite sometimes sluggish turn-out and close outcomes, is that everyone did get a chance to vote, whether they ultimately chose to vote for, against or abstain. As far as I am aware, this method has never yet delivered consensus, but it has delivered legitimacy, which is much more important.

Proponents of citizens’ assemblies will tell you that the number of participants involved don’t matter, because those who are selected are ‘representative’ of the society as a whole, but that’s some funny maths at best, not to mention quite crude identity politics. I would certainly never, for example, claim to represent any substantial chunk of immigrants, although I am, seen from a statistics point of view, indisputably an immigrant.

In service to this ‘representative’ argument, citizens’ assembly buffs even managed to forget a referendum. Back during the Irish same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, we actually held two referenda. The second one, on lowering the legal age to be President (a largely ceremonial role) didn’t pass. It didn’t pass by a landslide, despite the predecessor of the citizens’ assembly (the Constitutional Convention) having passed it. Not so representative now.

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By Tim Bale

The truth is advocates of citizens’ assemblies don’t worry about representativeness or legitimacy too much because the point is not to reflect what the wider society thinks, but what it would think if it weren’t so ignorant and misinformed. The idea is that if you think about an issue as hard as they have, you will inevitably come to the same conclusions they have. You know – the right ones.

I’ve had many conversations with pro-lifers. I had to – they’ve kept phoning me over two elections. And though I would call them many things – chief among them ‘persistent’ – they weren’t ignorant. They just had different values than I did on this point and ascribed to a different version of communal life.

I deeply disagree with that position, but I also disagree with all those traditionalists who voted against lowering the age to be President. But I accept that in a democracy I sometimes win and I sometimes lose. Although I think I am right, I may not always be. More than that, however, I’m unwilling to forego my rights to participate just to keep someone else from them, as I believe that in the long-run that is more dangerous than anything the people as a whole might actually decide to do.

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By Ben Cobley

It may be nice to get one’s way, but pushing ‘innovations’ like citizens’ assemblies, particularly at the expense of elections and referenda, is merely to weave the noose for your own neck. It means that you’re willing to disrespect your fellow citizens entirely to get something more important – the ‘right’ thing. That’s the exact calculation that every abusive regime the world has ever seen has made and it’s certainly holding the door wide for every other person and party out there who believes that their ideas of what is right are just so terribly important as to justify extraordinary measures.

No relationship can survive that kind of behaviour for long and a democracy is a relationship.

In a democracy, we are actually fundamentally saying to each other on a daily basis that you and your rights (and by extension, me and my rights) are more important to me than just getting my way is. That each person has entitlements no matter how woefully ignorant and awful I think they may be. That, importantly, each person has the potential to make a contribution to our society. This is a commitment that brings a lot of security with it.

That’s what we ultimately had here on the question of abortion in Ireland. You can’t outsource that. And you can’t just claim we did things differently because it’s convenient for you. There is no democracy without equal participation that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. Not here. Not anywhere.

Dr. Fuller’s new book In Defence of Democracy is out on 6th September.

“The mighty collective power of the UK’s £20bn advertising industry – which has been united in its support for Remain – has failed to find the compelling messaging we so desperately needed. Shame on us.”

For Christine Beale, global editor-in-chief for the industry magazine Campaign, and  her fellow PR and advertising gurus, Brexit presented a mighty wake-up call. Their job is to ‘sell’ us buying choices and opinions, and on the 24^th June 2016 their collective power had been found wanting. The sector was left licking its wounds.

The Referendum was direct democracy, unmediated by party politics and our first-past-the-post electoral system. Votes in safe seats counted equally to those in swing seats. The fixation of party managers on the latter, which simplifies their messaging efforts no end in general elections, was only of marginal importance here.

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The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

For those in the business of influencing, the message was clear – they had to do a lot better. They had to get serious, and far more political, and that meant turning their attention to democracy itself.

Once their initial outrage and despair had cleared, it was clear that campaigners for Remain were going to continue the fight, and that they would not be short of funding to do so. Over time they have consolidated around two fully-staffed operations: People’s Vote (headed by the City PR man Roland Rudd, with Peter Mandelson as a director) and Best for Britain, Gina Miller’s outfit that George Soros has funded.

A large part of their efforts has been focused on media management straight from the conventional PR-Mandelson playbook: lining up a succession of important and well-known folk to make targeted interventions in the public arena, co-ordinated by messaging and timed to have maximum impact on politics.

Day after wearisome day we have seen and heard the results of this as figures from our economic, cultural and political elites have been wheeled out to recycle the approved lines of the day: some variation on ‘Brexit is a disaster and must be overturned for our own good’.

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Time to scrap these toxic parties

By Polly Mackenzie

These efforts have appeared overwhelming at times, dominating our public sphere. But the campaigners have also realised that this sort of pressure is only part of what they need; that they are vulnerable to charges of elitism. They have seen that direct democracy is different; that 17.4 million votes needs more than a renewed Establishment push to overcome.

Hence the campaigners sought to reach out and build a ‘movement’; to defeat one instance of direct democracy with other versions – hoping that this will culminate in a second referendum on their terms; a People’s Vote. The drive to convert Leave voters goes on, but with limited success. It has been in mobilising Remain voters to participate – by posting on their social media, by marching, signing petitions and making donations – that they have been much more successful.

Just recently we have seen the astonishing success of these efforts. At the time of writing the Revoke Article 50 petition has secured nearly 6 million signatures. At the same time campaigners have managed to get mainstream media to report their claims that their march in London on Saturday attracted a million people (the likely real number is less than 400,000; still impressive but nowhere near the iconic figure claimed).

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On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

We know that Remain voters tend to be much more educated, younger, more networked and also wealthier than Leave voters on average. Check out the Revoke petition sorted by constituency and you will find a list of the wealthiest urban areas in the country, overwhelmingly in London. They are places full of people connected into networks of political, economic and cultural power; and also fully equipped with new technology to access the latest messaging and talking points.

In other words, the average Remainer participating in these activities is the sort of person that advertising and consumer public relations target anyway as a matter of course. They have proved relatively easy to reach and to mobilise.

Brexit voters are rather more elusive. This has been both a strength and a weakness for the pro-Brexit side. It is a strength because they have been mostly impervious to the daily bombardment of media messaging, both before the Referendum and since. But it is a weakness because this lack of connectedness reflects a general lack of access and organisation, a lack of political power beyond that basic ability to go out and vote.

We can see this in the contrast between the several well-attended anti-Brexit marches and the dearth of similar efforts – or rather successful efforts – to defend Brexit. Saturday’s gathering in London may have been much smaller than the campaigners and their media supporters said, but 400,000 is still a big number – and the widespread positive media coverage testifies to its success.

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Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsan

Compare this to Leave Means Leave’s effort, led by Nigel Farage, albeit without his presence for most of it. The idea of marching from Sunderland to London to protest is a powerful one, evoking the Jarrow March of the 1930s. However Farage is a divisive figure, the numbers have been small and the effort has gained little media coverage.

This relates to a wider issue. While the London media can hardly move for pro-Remain voices from various groups, pro-Leave ones are much thinner on the ground. Pro-Brexit activities struggle for funds, and are hampered by the greater dispersion of Leave voters. Compare Remain and Leave campaigning now and you see on the one hand a professional, well-funded and proactive operation and on the other a motley crew of small organisations and individuals who are constantly in reactive mode, bickering with each other and responding to what the other side are doing rather than setting the agenda themselves.

The Brexit vote was perhaps the only way in which those people who voted for Brexit could bypass established political and economic power and get themselves heard on their own terms.

At least for a brief window, a powerless, disorganised rabble shook things up and defeated the powers-that-be – by voting.

However, those powers have regrouped, adjusted and redeployed since this rebellion. They have mobilised their most ardent supporters, gathering them together to form a group that has developed a strong identity; a class consciousness even. They have learned the techniques of direct democracy and deployed them to re-assert their own power.

These and other counter-moves have left the largest exercise in direct democracy this country has seen in tatters, torn apart from every side: from within the Government itself, by most of our media and major institutions, but also online and in the streets.

This is what political power does. It wins.

“But no firing squad. No torture or retribution. No bloodshed. A very British coup, wouldn’t you say?”

So ran an exchange between firebrand socialist prime minister Harry Perkins and his nemesis, the scheming head of MI5, Sir Percy Browne, in the gripping climax to the TV adaptation of Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup. Man-of-the-people Perkins was ‘a bad dream’ to Sir Percy and his establishment friends. So they conspired to bring him down by falsely implicating him in a financial scandal.

Is it over-egging things to suggest there are parallels between the former Left-wing MP Mullin’s novel and attempts today to sabotage the result of the EU referendum? Perhaps. But the clash between the wishes of the people in voting for radical change and the determination of the ruling class to prevent it is very much of the same theme.

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The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

The irresistible force of the popular vote has run up against the seemingly immovable object of the massed ranks of the establishment. And, like in Mullin’s thriller, the latter has plotted and connived, sometimes brazenly, often stealthily, to subvert the democratic will.

Amid the tumult and the shouting, it’s worth taking a step back to reflect on the course of events. In 2015, five in six MPs voted to hold a referendum on membership of the EU. Then, a year later, in the biggest democratic exercise ever witnessed in our nation’s history, more than 33 million people went to the polls and a majority voted for secession. They didn’t vote to leave only with a divorce agreement that the EU was willing to approve. No, the question on the ballot paper was simple: remain or leave.

MPs subsequently voted overwhelmingly to trigger Article 50 to enshrine in law the UK’s departure from the EU on 29 March 2019. No caveats, no conditions – we were heading out, deal or no deal.

But, as time has elapsed, the early consensus among the establishment that the will of the people was sacred and must be respected has crumbled. And in its place we have seen a growing resistance, a feature of which has been the deployment of the most crude and paternalistic arguments in an effort to justify the attempt to debase our democracy.

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Our political class is afraid to govern

By Paul Embery

As if that were not bad enough, the post-referendum debate among Westminster politicians and the commentariat has missed the mark spectacularly by focusing almost exclusively on the dry, technical issues of Brexit: the Single Market and Customs Union, the Irish border backstop, and so on.

These things are important of course, but no-one in power has yet bothered to initiate a serious discussion about what drove so many of their fellow citizens to vote Leave in the first place – defining issues such as community, identity, democracy and belonging.

People voted Leave in such large numbers because they felt the political class in this country had stopped listening to them. And in the almost three years since, that political class has done everything in its power to prove them right. Little wonder that minds haven’t been changed and the polls are broadly mirroring what they were doing in the run-up to the referendum.

So here we stand: a government desperately trying to flog a deal that falls short of a genuine Brexit and threatening a delay to the whole project if it isn’t accepted; an opposition apparently bent on committing electoral suicide by demanding we vote again; and a wider establishment – including civil servants and business chiefs – doing its damnedest to ensure the thing doesn’t happen at all.

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The Left's long history of antisemitism

By James Bloodworth

Oh, and into the fray has now come a sour band of recalcitrants in the form of the so-called Independent Group, determined, apparently, to ‘change politics’ while actually fighting tooth and nail to preserve the status quo.

These people aren’t the future. Far from being motivated by a craving for political change, they are in fact contemptuous of those who have disrupted the prevailing order. It will come as a nasty shock when they eventually discover, as they surely will, that their desire to return to the narrow and elitist liberal centrist orthodoxy that created such disaffection and discontent in our society in the first place, is shared by few beyond their own bubble.

For Labour, which has responded by changing its position on a ‘People’s Vote’, this could prove a seminal moment. Not only does its call for a fresh referendum constitute a clear breach of its previous commitments to honour the 2016 result, it also defies all political logic.

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The trouble with TIGgers

By Graeme Archer

Its slow haemorrhaging of support across its once-loyal working-class heartlands over recent years, as well as the reality that those heartlands voted decisively for Brexit and would be repelled still more by any suggestion of a re-run of the vote, ought to have been enough to persuade it not to alienate its core vote any further. But apparently not. The party of workers is now preparing to traverse the country telling workers they got it wrong. It should come as no surprise that the first survey of the public’s reaction to Labour’s latest position shows working-class voters opposed to the party’s new position.

In choosing to pitch to its largely middle-class, urban, pro-EU membership rather than its traditional base, Labour has blundered badly. Its message to seventeen million people is: ‘Your Leave vote is no longer safe with us.’ The party may well pay a heavy price for prioritising Hampstead over Hartlepool. It wouldn’t be undeserved.

Labour folk supporting the idea of a second referendum should be careful what they wish for. What do they envisage would happen if Labour came to power under Corbyn? There is every likelihood that the formidable apparatus of the establishment, big business and the media included, will be turned against an incoming Corbyn government, just as it was against the fictional Harry Perkins administration.

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Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsan

Capital flight, a run on sterling, disinvestment, threatened relocation of business – all of these things may confront them. In some quarters this would no doubt lead to demands for another general election on the grounds that ‘People didn’t know what they were voting for,’ that ‘The facts have changed,’ and ‘Nobody voted to be poorer’. What then? Consistency would dictate that Labour concede to these demands. Democracy would dictate it resist them.

We often forget that democracy was extended fully to the working-class in Britain fewer than a hundred years ago. Some among today’s elite would appear to regret it ever happened. But they subvert the popular will at their peril.

It may seem that, while the political class postures and preens, the pliable and subservient masses are still going about their daily business in their normal, quiet way, disinclined to question the judgement of their ‘betters’. But it would be unwise to mistake this silence for acquiescence. For as the gilet jaunes have shown across the Channel, if you chip away enough at people’s faith in the democratic process and their ability to hold their political leaders to account, then from behind that silence a mighty roar will eventually emerge.

There are several key obstacles to this. The first is that very few Leavers have changed their minds. In the nearly three years that have passed since the first referendum there has certainly been a slight drift toward Remain. But the scale of this shift is routinely exaggerated by the second referendum herd.

Only last week, the latest poll by Survation had Remain on 55% and Leave on 45%, while the ‘poll of polls’, which calculates an average from all polls, gives the two camps similar figures. Allowing for a margin of error of three points, the argument that the ‘will of the people’ has fundamentally changed should be met with scepticism.

These numbers are also similar to those seen in the final week of the first referendum, with pollsters like YouGov, Populus, ComRes and ORB all putting Remain ahead. Look a bit closer and you also see that very few Leavers display ‘Bregret’; even today, after everything, 90% say that the vote for Brexit was ‘right’. In fact, it is actually people who did not vote in 2016 who now lean heavily toward Remain. So the question the Second Referendum agitators must consider is, will 2016’s non-voters turnout when it matters? And we don’t really know. It still looks like a coin toss.

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Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsab

Those campaigning for a second ballot must also grapple with the inconvenient fact that most people don’t want one. As my colleague Sir John Curtice has pointed out, the popularity of a second referendum is “clearly largely confined to those who wish to reverse Brexit”. Indeed, according to recent polling, most people think that the original result should be respected. Even when pollsters remind them of the gridlock within parliament, only 36% think that a second referendum is a ‘good idea’. Dragging reluctant voters back to the ballot box to have a say on something that they do not really want to have a say on is risky, especially when Leavers will argue that Remain ‘just doesn’t get it’.

And I’m not entirely sure that they do get it. If they did, they would not be issuing economic warnings from the snowy hills of Davos. Some readers might argue that this is a cheap shot – but one key lesson of 2016 is that optics matter. The ideal script for Leavers has always been the one trotted out by distant politicians in faraway places talking only about economics. In recent weeks, Tony Blair, George Osborne and Roland Rudd were perfectly willing to deliver those lines on cue.

These optics are key because a second referendum is bound to be far more anti-establishment than the first. There will be much less talk about trade and much more talk about all that is wrong with Westminster. Leavers will inevitably claim that that the political class have ruined Brexit, ignored people’s concerns and been unable to reach a decision. They will also argue that politicians have actively sought to  thwart the entire project despite voting for the first referendum to take place, Article 50 to be triggered, standing on manifestos committed to leaving the EU and then voting for the Withdrawal Act. We already know that anti-establishment populism and distrust of politics was a significant driver of support for Leave (for research see here and here). It’s not hard to imagine how these drivers will become even stronger.

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How British politics is failing

By Peter Kellner

Britain does need to tread carefully. Last week, the Edelman group found that 61% of all British people feel that their views are not represented in politics; 59% believe that government is not listening to ‘people like them’; and 58% feel that most politicians are not being honest with the public. Similarly, ComRes discovered that nearly eight in ten Brits feel that politicians are not taking into account the views or concerns of ordinary people while nearly two-thirds feel that the main parties do not offer an appealing choice of who to vote for. Clearly, some of these disillusioned voters are Remainers but the warning signs of a larger rebellion against the established politicians are visible. This is what Leavers are planning on, of course. Their slogan will be ‘Tell them again’.

Remain, meanwhile, needs to stop arguing that those who voted for Brexit did not really know what they were voting for. This sits uneasily with all that we know about Leavers. As virtually every study has shown, most Leavers did know, at least in broad terms, why they were voting for Brexit. They wanted powers returned from the EU to the nation state and they wanted to end freedom of movement, which they see as being central to slowing overall immigration into Britain.

Many also wanted a wider shake-up of what they see as a broken settlement; a place where London gets a lot and everywhere else gets a little; where influence and status are too strongly organized around the university-educated middle-class; where economic power is too strongly concentrated in financial services; where some of our prominent liberal commentators can come across as uncaring, condescending or even openly dismissive of traditional ways of life; and where the national conversation can appear neglectful or contemptuous towards Leavers. Remainers tend to struggle with conversations about things that are not material and extend beyond individual rights; things like dignity, recognition, solidarity, belonging, tradition, identity and culture.

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Could Brexit fix our broken politics?

By Giles Fraser

For example, one reaction to the Brexit vote that has angered Leavers has been the rush to frame them as bigots, racists, the perpetrators of hate crime and as coming exclusively from the white working-class. Vox-pops with white pensioners complaining about immigration in Stoke-on-Trent or Clacton dominate. Meanwhile, we’ve heard almost nothing from minority ethnic, affluent or liberal Leavers who also made Brexit possible. If Brexit really was only driven by white workers who had been battered by Thatcherism and austerity, who just wanted better wages and a bit more job security, then all of this would be much simpler. But it was not. Anxiety about cultural and social change mattered as much, if not more so, than anxiety about economics.

Rather than change the messengers and the message, many Remain leaders are stuck in an ‘economic doom loop’, recycling and endlessly repeating claims about domestic economic risk. This is deeply problematic not least because when people think about the EU they tend to stress external risks: large-scale migration, borders, security, the refugee crisis, terrorism, whether the EU is sufficiently democratic and transparent, and whether it really is possible to reform things like free movement.

Furthermore, while economically insulated middle-class Leavers are unlikely to be swayed by the argument that Brexit will shave a few points off growth, economically left behind Leavers are convinced that today’s economic settlement, which they are being asked to sustain, is exactly why they have been left behind.

I think there are also other reasons to question this strategy. Irrespective of the validity of the claims, we are now at a point in British politics where voters have been subjected to nearly a decade’s worth of economic catastrophising. Warnings about the economy ran through the 2010, 2015 and 2017 general election campaigns, as well as the 2014 campaign against Scottish independence and the 2016 campaign against Brexit. Voters are not only tired of elections but are perhaps also tired of the strategy.

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Five ways Theresa May could have played things differently

By James Kirkup

Even when Leavers do think about the economy they are also often not thinking about the short-term shocks. Remainers should reflect on the fact that while many Leavers accepted at the time of the 2016 referendum that Brexit could well entail some economic disruption, this would be worth it for the longer-term gains. Today, for example, Leavers appear fairly convinced that five years from now, their households will be better off as a result of the country leaving the EU.

Lastly, the relentless focus on economic catastrophe is also at odds with the objective economic reality that now surrounds us. I think, on balance, it is reasonable to claim that Brexit has curbed some growth and that No Deal would cause disruption. It is also true that levels of pessimism about the economy are reaching levels that we have not come close to since the depths of the financial crisis, though I suspect that the drivers of this are actually mixed and not all down to Brexit.

But it is hard to convince voters that the sky is about to collapse when Britain is experiencing the strongest labour market figures on record and as wages are now beginning to outstrip inflation. Unlike when Britain initially voted to stay in the European Community in the 1970s, when the country really was the ‘sick man of Europe’, we now live in an age when growth across the globe is forecast to slow, including and perhaps most importantly in China, while the fundamentals of the Eurozone area look far from strong.

Economic activity in the EU area has now fallen to the slowest pace in five years, manufacturing is squeezed, business confidence is down and there are still big problems with banks, debt and unemployment, especially in the south. I’m just not convinced that asking people to compare Britain’s economy with the picture across the Channel is a wise move in the current environment.

In any case, after last week’s votes in parliament, the likelihood of a second vote has receded. But those continuing to campaign for another referendum would do well to consider the points above. Too few have reflected on the lessons of 2016, a basic problem that will also likely hold back any new anti-Brexit ‘centrist’ party. In fact, they’re making the same mistakes all over again. And given that Remain seems unable to change the messenger or message, a second referendum could easily deliver the same outcome as the first.

“Yes of COURSE there are people who voted Leave for reasons other than xenophobic bigotry or fading imperial jingoism. I’ve met at least four. But it felt good to be marching through London with the hundred thousand yesterday. And to be reminded of the decent half of Britain.”

Classy, Prof. That’s half the country dismissed as indecent ignoramuses because they voted a different way fr you in a referendum.

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How liberal bias created Fox News

By Nigel Cameron

Listening out for the hysterical outpourings of the grieving liberal intelligentsia can be an interesting pastime. It’s almost as if they are trying to outdo each other in their paroxysms of utter contempt for the mob.

How about this from novelist and journalist Howard Jacobson in a recent interview?

“We’re coming to the comeuppance of democracy. You can’t trust the people… you can be certain that the people will get it wrong. They’d already done it, as far as I was concerned, in Brexit… And then with Trump again. The people given this new confidence in their own opinions. Their inability to distinguish true from false.”

There is, of course, an obvious explanation for why millions of working-class people voted for Trump and Brexit. But you’d need to rub shoulders with them every once in a while to know it.

These millions, whether in the US rust belt or the towns of post-industrial England, were angry and alienated. Left behind by globalisation, witnessing their communities rapidly changing from the effects of deindustrialisation and large-scale movements of people, suffering the effects of low wages and poor housing, they took the opportunity to hit back against a cloth-eared liberal establishment that had treated them with disdain for too long. Treat people like cattle, and you’ll get kicked.

You don’t have to be a cheerleader for Trump or Brexit to recognise this obvious truth.

But for the Dawkinses and Jacobsons and other such political and cultural elitists, that isn’t good enough. For them, there is an alternative explanation: we, the masses, were victims of propaganda, ‘low-information’ dupes too stupid to realise we were being exploited and misled.

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No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

So we need to be saved from the consequences of our own ignorance. And that means cracking down on anything or anyone filling our uneducated, impressionable minds with ‘fake news’.

Accordingly, anything that, in their own delusionary minds, contributed to Trump or Brexit or the current upsurge of ‘populism’ is in their crosshairs: the tabloids, social media companies, Arron Banks, obscure data analytics firms, Russians bots, big red buses, you name it.

For the new sinister agenda is not just to subvert the referendum result, but also to establish a compliant media where, in future, only the ‘facts’ as interpreted by these enlightened progressives and their chosen experts may be allowed to see the light of day.

Of course they know they can’t get away with crude bans on platforms giving air to alternative opinions, so their methods are more insidious. Thus we see increasingly restrictive laws designed to suppress freedom of speech, support for state-backed regulation of the press, boycotts of mainstream newspapers, and the sinister threat to reputations and livelihoods for the crime of saying the wrong thing.

This mix of draconian legislation on the one hand and a repressive and intimidating public atmosphere on the other is toxic. The end goal is to batter us into submission so we think twice before expressing unfashionable opinions.

You can see it in the activities of outfits such as Stop Funding Hate – an authoritarian and menacing campaign dressed up as ethical and progressive. This group demands a boycott of any company which advertises in newspapers spreading “hate” (for which read ‘newspapers whose editorial line we dislike’). Several firms, fearful of damage to profits and reputations, have capitulated. They know the group is serious. It would happily see businesses, large and small, go to the wall and be forced to throw thousands of ordinary workers on to the scrapheap for the crime of advertising in the ‘wrong’ newspapers. So much for its high-minded ethics.

Its target isn’t really hate, of course; it is alternative opinions, particularly those traditional, some might say old-fashioned, opinions to which millions of Britons still hold true, but which are considered beyond the pale by the liberal elite.

It goes without saying that Stop Funding Hate enjoys the support of the modern Left, which sees itself as the tribune of all things decent and righteous.

But instead of championing these assaults on our freedoms, we on the Left should be fighting tooth and nail against them. Our radical tradition is that of the Levellers and Chartists, of Tom Paine and George Orwell, of those who railed against the status quo of their time and agitated for the right to disseminate anti-establishment propaganda of their own.

The United Kingdom currently stands at number 40 in the Press Freedom Index. That ought to shame us all. A nation which seeks to muzzle those holding dissenting views isn’t truly free.

Like the poor, propaganda has always been with us. But we must be trusted to recognise it for ourselves. We aren’t so thick as to require some group of worthy elitists – all harbouring their own agenda of course – to filter our information or to choose our sources of news.

I along with millions of other working-class people voted for Brexit for reasons of democracy, community, place, belonging and accountability. Don’t tell us we did so because of something we read in the Daily Mail or on the side of a bus. For if you believe that, you really understand nothing of your own country.