A second referendum looks very unlikely - No Deal does too but is not impossible

A Romanian friend asked me at lunch yesterday if England really will leave the E.U. I said that had she asked me a week earlier I'd have said I wasn't sure. But now I felt sure that we would.

It seems, though I am far away, that people in England want this thing decided. Not that leaving with or without a deal will decide things: in either case the negotiations with the EU will go on for years. But at least we shall have left.

Almost half the country wants to leave with No Deal, say the polls. 

The extreme Remainers have suddenly gone oddly very quiet about their demand for a second referendum, because they think it won't happen and if it did they would probably lose it. 

But it won't happen, if only because it would apparently take a year to organise (how come the Greeks organised one in a week?) and would probably come to the same result as last time. 

And then, after another year of anguish and fury over Brexit, we should probably be in the same awful place we are now.


And if Remain were to win, trust in democracy would be ended, the legitimacy of our political system would cease upon the midnight and the split down the middle in the country would take two decades to mend.

Even though the BBC's Question Time usually only has one Brexiteer on the panel and a leftish audience, the last two weeks have witnessed huge prolonged cheering for No Deal.

This story in the Guardian four hours ago tells you what is happening.

Labour’s backing for Yvette Cooper’s anti no-deal Brexit amendment has been thrown into doubt, after a shadow cabinet ally of Jeremy Corbyn warned that supporting it would smack of “ignoring the views of millions of ordinary folk”.

Labour had been widely expected to whip its MPs to support the amendment, tabled by Cooper and the former Conservative minister Nick Boles, which paves the way for a backbench bill mandating the government to seek a nine-month extension to article 50.

But Jon Trickett, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, told the Guardian voters in his constituency would regard support for the measure on Tuesday as a failure to respect the result of the 2016 referendum.

“Over the weekend I was speaking to some people in my constituency. They weren’t actually people who voted for leave, though the majority of people in my constituency had voted for leave. What they said was people have struggled for the vote, people have died pursuing the vote. Other people have been sent to Australia or put in prison – and the vote actually is a precious thing, when you think about it,” Trickett said.

“What they said is, look, we voted remain, but we’ve had a vote: get on with it. And I think that probably does capture a large swathe of opinion in the country. That’s how I feel about this amendment. I feel that it may look to people as if we’re trying to somehow remove the earlier decision, which was to Brexit."