The Brexit result should be shown respect it is due

Last week, in this column, before the EU referendum vote took place and the result became known, I predicted that a silent majority would vote to Brexit because of the division between an arrogant and loud “we know best” brigade who wanted - and expected - the UK to remain in the EU and a quietly angry section of the population who have felt their views have been shouted down.

But it was hard to imagine the other divisions that have opened up: between young and old, between north and south, between the professional classes and the working classes.

YouGov said that 75 per cent of 18-24-year-olds voted to remain in the EU - but then wasn’t that the YouGov whose eve-of-poll gave Remain a four-point lead and also got it completely wrong in the last General Election?

I don’t quite trust its figures now, but it’s still highly likely that a high proportion of young people did vote to stay in the EU.

That doesn’t give them the right to criticise the right of older people to vote how they wanted, whether it was to leave or to remain.

Everyone who is eligible to vote has an equal right to their opinion and to express it with their vote.

The prevailing attitude that if you haven’t voted the “right” way then your vote isn’t valid is very worrying because it’s a form of bullying and it’s also an unhealthy swing towards a form of dictatorship by what has now been shown to be a minority in this country - a big minority, yes, but still a minority.

It’s this attitude that has prompted the online petition for a second referendum because the result wasn’t what its signatories wanted.

No, the referendum was democratic and valid so the result should stand.

“Democracy has failed us because it was ill-informed,” said that well-known political expert (and part-time pop star) Damon Albarn at Glastonbury after the result became known.

Well, this was democracy in action - and ill-informed? There was certainly no shortage of information from the Remain campaign - earlier this year, the Government spent £9 million on a 14-page document, sent to 27 million homes, setting out its case for remaining in the EU. Never has so much information been available about both sides of a debate, it was all there if you wanted it.

I doubt Albarn would have said democracy had failed us if the result had been to his satisfaction.

It is this kind of attitude, most commonly seen members of in the liberal intelligentsia who loudly and proudly parade their tolerance towards anything and anyone except anyone whose views don’t coincide with their own, that now derides all those dreadful “thick northerners” who dared to vote to leave?

Nobody has listened to them, no one has taken their fears and their worries seriously, no one dared to debate the real issues properly.

They have been ignored for too long, branded as racist before they could even get a word in edgeways, and the EU referendum has been their one and only chance to rise up and speak their minds. If their views has been sought, respected by politicians and addressed properly and thoroughly (and not dismissed with the same arrogant sneer of Gordon Brown, who a few years ago famously called voter Gillian Duffy a “bigoted woman” when she asked questions about debt and immigration), the result might have been very different last Friday.

In the end, the EU referendum result boiled down to an unwillingness to address the fears and concerns of a a sizeable majority of the voting public whose views were dismissed as bigoted and therefore invalid. The Remain camp and its supporters got it wrong in the way they went about their campaign and perhaps they will learn from that.

Me? I wish we had voted to stay in the EU, despite my concerns that the institution itself was growing into a superstate, becoming too big, too unwieldy, too remote and, most worryingly, too unaccountable.

Tennis commentator John Inverdale infamously said 2013 Wimbledon winner Marion Bartoli was “never going to be a looker”.

Three years later, she has lost five stone and looks dramatically different. She says “I truly like John, he never meant to say it like that and it can happen to anybody. We have a great relationship and we don’t look back, we look forward.”

Whatever possesses people to comment thoughtlessly and publicly on other people’s looks, particularly if they are not flattering comments? Just last week, a study by the University of Connecticut showed that parents commenting their daughter’s weight when they were children left them with a lifetime of worrying about their weight.

They remembered what their parents had said, and even if it had only been one comment, its lasting and damaging effects were as severe as if the comment had been made frequently.

The study’s author advises parents to think very carefully about the way their concerns about a child’s weight is conveyed. The same advice, I think, should be given to television commentators.