Tim Stanley who, as a teenager, was an enthusiastic member of The Next Generation, and who, as a journalist, has been a featured speaker at it, wrote a typically good column in Saturday's Telegraph. He has a remarkably simple insight:
First, we all know what Brexit means. It means we’re leaving the EU. That’s all. Simple really. Lots of other countries apparently exist outside the EU, some of them are doing rather well. China, Japan, America… oh, the list is surprisingly long.
Yes, it is what more people voted for than have ever voted for anything in the history of our democracy. It is what I voted for. We voted to leave the EU and make our own laws instead of having them imposed from outside. People were fed up of having no say in whether their kettles had to take an extra minute to boil or their light bulbs another three seconds to light up. They were irritated that outsiders were banning the sale of packs of 10 cigarettes to poor people, or of packs of 16 or 17 in vending machines, or of menthol cigarettes, and they voted to stop it.
I added some economics to the sovereignty arguments because I want the UK to trade globally rather than remaining part of a narrow protectionist bloc of diminishing importance. We can do this outside the EU but not inside. As Tim Stanley says:
We are leaving the EU; the details will out as the process takes its course. Why is that so hard to grasp? It’s not, of course. Most of the high-profile critics of the Prime Minister are fiercely intelligent and they understand entirely how Brexit works. They just don’t want it to happen. So they take every bit of bad news, every bump in the road as an excuse to shout: “Stop the car! Reverse, reverse!”
He points out that the critics use a variety of specious arguments to thwart the democratic decision from being effected:
For instance, they are all now fans of parliamentary sovereignty and insist that Parliament debate Brexit. These are people who for forty years were happy to let Brussels dictate UK legislation. No, they are not reasserting the power of Parliament. They are using Parliament in a last ditch attempt to overturn the result of the referendum.
Tim Stanley accepts what he says Theresa May has accepted, that the UK's future will now be outside the EU. It is a bold step into an unknown future, and critics of it should now recognize that it will happen instead of hoping that it won't. They would be welcome on side to join those of us who are going to make it work.