Matthew Parris, writing in the right-wing "Spectator" refers to the threat that there will be civil unrest if brexit is not "delivered"-
"Barry Gardiner, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for international trade, resisting the idea of a second referendum on the Today programme last year. ‘You never give as much succour to the extreme right as when you cut off the mechanism of democratic change,’ Mr Gardiner said. If Brexit were overturned, people (not him!) could ‘turn to other, more socially disruptive ways of expressing their views, and that is the danger here’.
This is disreputable. Make no mistake: whatever the protestations of those who wave in our face the possibility of social unrest, they are helping to talk it up. ‘Support May’s deal or people will riot!’ This is silly, irresponsible talk. Imagine you’re one of these thugs on the British far-right, and you hear IDS tell the BBC that if we allow a further referendum we could get something like the gilets jaunes here
in Britain. Can you doubt it would quicken the pulse of certain troublemakers? Nobody is more encouraged than the barbarians to hear the cry ‘the barbarians are at the gates!’
And there is to me something deeply un-Conservative about this tack. A proper Conservative does not pray in aid of his argument by citing criminal elements that may otherwise be unleashed. Who would have looked kindly on those who told us to give ground to the IRA lest we offer them reason to bomb us?
So can there ever be a morally respectable case for using predictions of civil unrest as an argument against a proposed policy? Undoubtedly. The dividing line between the reputable and the disreputable use of ‘the mob won’t stand for it’ is the imminence or otherwise, and the certainty or otherwise, of the predicted disorder.
When Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax was first mooted, opponents on the left would have been disreputable to predict riots in Trafalgar Square if this passed into law. Nobody then had good reason to know disorder was likely, and such talk would have helped fuel the very response of which it warned. But later, when it was clear that order was close to breaking down in demonstrations against the tax, and the reform was bitterly and angrily disliked by tens of millions of people, it became only reasonable to remind policymakers of what was looming.
How imminent, then, and how certain would we judge widespread civil disorder to be, if MPs opt for a new test of public opinion on Brexit, three years after the first one? I cannot even begin to construct a case for forecasting this with confidence. Far more people have demonstrated against Brexit than for it, so far. Where and who are these imagined rioters in the north of England, smashing windows to stop a democratic test of public opinion (or to protest against its result)?
My best guess is there would be anger for a while, though probably not on the scale triggered by the Iraq war, and on nothing like the scale triggered by Mrs Thatcher’s battle with the coal miners. The culprits would be the usual suspects, whipped up by the usual suspects. And within a year or two it would all pass."
www.spectator.co.uk/2019/02/those-who-warn-of-brexit-civil-unrest-are-inviting-it/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_content=020219_Weekly_Highlights_05&utm_campaign=Weekly_Highlights
