Andrew Marr has certainly kicked up quite a festive flurry of controversy with his New Statesman article An optimist's guide to Brexit. He's essentially called for Remoaners to stop remoaning and seize the invigorating, exciting opportunities that Brexit could bring.
His piece begins:
You hear it in the dingy corners of a crumbling Westminster Palace, at discreetly expensive restaurants and in noxious, Christmas-festooned pubs. You hear it from former prime ministers and lowly special advisers, and even from foreign leaders.
“Brexit will not happen.” It cannot actually happen. Parliament, we are told, will force the deluded people to come to their senses, aided by the judiciary and big business. If the people have made a mistake, then can they not be shown the latest economic forecasts and be obliged, somehow, to think again?
With respect to all involved, and – briefly – to adopt the demotic of Boris Johnson, this must be cobblers. If parliament asked the people of the UK to vote on a subject of such huge importance; and if, after exhaustive and exhausting debate, they made their decision, by a clear majority; and if they were then told that it wasn’t going to happen, or at least not without a second vote, the glossy fabric of British democracy would be ripped to shreds. Frankly, I dread to think what would follow.
It is time to think differently. Brexit is coming, and relatively soon. We have to assume that the UK will be outside the EU within two and a bit years. An entirely new chapter in our politics will then begin. Yet most of the British political class is so battered and demoralised by the Brexit decision that they cannot take what is likely at face value, and start to chart how they intend to reshape a country that has much more power over its own governance.
Those Remoaners, naturally, are having none of it - well, at least the ones on Twitter who have replied to Andrew Marr. He's felt compelled to respond (and they still aren't having any of it):
So the Remoaners on Twitter are telling Mr Marr where to go but will his message hit home at the BBC? Will it, for example, ever percolate its way into the brains of the people behind, say, Newsnight, who still seem to be going through the Five Stages of Grief about Brexit (just like the Twitter crowd), six months on?
2017 will tell.
