MATTHEW PARRIS

Matthew Parris has written a piece for his Times blog (HERE) and it's well worth reading. He, like many of us, is concerned at the vitriol used against those of us who want to remain in the EU and points out that many of the articles attacking remoaners are a smoke screen for a lack of progress towards the Brexit they assured us would be quick and easy.  He writes:

For my friend, Times colleague and Leave campaigner, Michael Gove, to spend every paragraph — yes, every paragraph — of his column yesterday railing against the side that lost the European referendum campaign attests more eloquently to suppressed panic than anything we the vanquished could write. Edvard Munch’s The Scream hovered over his words.

The Freudians call it displacement activity, and it tells us so much. To our intense disquiet we find the victors, hollow-cheeked, still stalking the battlefield, kicking irritably at corpses, months after their war was won.  

Bayonet the wounded all you like, Leavers, but the nation waits to hear your plans. You have the baton. Where are you going to run?

The initiative is yours. We await your proposals and we accept your right — even (as I have written) your duty — to proceed with them. But we want to know what they are. How do you plan to make this thing work? Michael Gove began his column with three short sentences: “Take. Back. Control.” I can reply with one: “How?” Or perhaps in the same vein: “What. Are. You. Going. To. Do?”

We ask because the suspicion grows that none of you has the foggiest. And if that’s true then you have betrayed the trust of 17 million people who thought you knew. Before the referendum you assumed the mantle of “us” in a revolt against “them” and profited mightily from that assumption. But now you’re in charge. You’re not Us any more: you’re Them, the new Establishment, the powers that be. You are the experts we were enjoined to scorn. So scream — because the people’s anger will be terrible.