Remainers Assemble!

Two options for the (potentially) defeated and embittered in the Graun today. First Monbiot, who has come quite a long way considering:

British people are fundamentally disempowered by our political system. Other countries show that there’s another way 

 [We currently have] a 19th-century model of democracy that permits no popular engagement other than an election every few years, and a referendum every few decades?...Representative democracy is a remarkably blunt instrument. Hundreds of issues are bundled together at every election, yet the vote tends to swing on just one or two of them. The government then presumes consent for its entire programme 

Then it gets a bit soggy:

I want to see it balanced by popular sovereignty, especially the variety known as deliberative democracy....drawing citizens together to solve problems. It means creating forums in which we listen respectfully to each other, seek to understand each other’s views, change our minds when necessary, and create the rich, informed democratic culture currently missing from national life.

Some of this looks a little bit like Autonomism,especially in the Brazilian example he cites:

citizens were able to decide how the city’s entire investment budget should be spent. The process was... allowed to evolve as citizens suggested improvements. Some 50,000 people a year participated.

Others look like a talkshop begging to be colonised by the financially secure chattering classes:

In Ireland, a citizens’ assembly on abortion law turned an angry debate into a considered one. It tested competing claims and ideas, and led eventually to a referendum. The Better Reykjavík programme allows the citizens of Iceland’s capital to put forward ideas for the city’s improvement, which other people vote on.  The 15 most popular ideas every month are passed to the city council to consider.[a bit lame] 

Then the expected focus:

The European referendum, that apparently represents the people’s will, was reduced to such a crude choice that no one knows exactly what the majority voted for. Rather than encouraging an informed, nuanced politics, it has made our system even more adversarial, binary and reductive....I could see the point of Brexit if it meant returning power to the people. But Johnson is as contemptuous of popular sovereignty as he is of parliamentary sovereignty.

Elsewhere, R Behr develops more common Graun perspectives:

Among the ‘smashed avocado metro-elite’ is a generation of young people radicalised by Brexit

An opening weird comment:

[Johnson's] deal horrifies anyone with even a trace of attachment to European institutions. It explicitly prohibits negotiation of intimate trade [tariffs on ladies' underwear?] If a more distant relationship isn’t agreed quickly, a nasty, familiar cliff-edge comes back into view.  

The Brexiteers in the Tory Party are increasingly sectarian and he fears their wrath:

[They] will pursue the defeated side until the very memory of a pro-European Toryism is extinguished....Europhobic fanaticism has broken the will of some remainers but radicalised the rest. 

This seems a suitably empty radicalism for Gardianistas, because there are still problems in agreeing a concrete alternative:

the People’s Vote campaign has whipped up demand for a referendum, but that is an expedient to avert Brexit [surely not?] not an argument why EU membership is worth saving. Many Europhiles find the thought of another bitterly fought plebiscite dispiriting, so they shrink from the policy printed on the banner under which they rally. Charismatic leadership celebrating the pro-European cause on its own terms is no more available now than it was in 2016. [well,how about Corbyn? Swinson? Grieve? Starmer? Various SNP folk?]

Leavers are haunted by a spectral return, of the temporarily humiliated if not exactly the repressed:

Their fear is that Labour’s pro-Europeans will escape the debilitation of Corbyn’s leadership and that a refreshed, united opposition will turn remain into rejoin. [It will energise the purely] cultural dynamics sustaining the anti-Brexit movement. The pro-EU electorate has been poorly served by the main English parties but, paradoxically, that has nurtured attachment to remain as an identity. In the absence of capable political representation, the cause has become a grievance – a lingering burn in the hearts of people who didn’t think about their status as citizens of Europe before 2016, but now resent having that citizenship, and all it represents, withdrawn.

Let us not despair:

Remainers come in all ages, but their numbers swell in younger cohorts. They are more likely to live in cities, but they are spread all over the country. There are millions of them and they vote...[Brexiteers might have their moments of triumph but]   But those feelings will, I suspect, be weak and transient compared with the anguish and loss felt on the other side. Leavers will not thank politicians for Brexit, not with the passion and persistence of the remainers who will punish them for it.[What sort of punishment does Behr want, I wonder?]

Revenge and punishment fantasies -- what a Guardina vision!