Last week, a column by the liberal, pro-European journalist Hugo Rifkind about the 2016 Referendum reminded me that, of the two charlatan-led political parties currently hoovering up votes from the Labour Party on account of its ostrich-like stance on Brexit – Reform UK from the right, and the Green Party from the left – only one actually voted in Parliament to hold the stupendously stupid plebiscite. And it wasn’t Reform UK.

In his column in the Times, Rifkind noted that the mind-bogglingly stupid 2016 Referendum has since “bound successive governments to a mandate they don’t believe in”:

When Andy Burnham becomes our seventh [prime minister] since the Brexit vote, he will be the fifth one of them who didn’t vote for it. This has not been some Establishment stitch-up. Rather, it has been the direct consequence of divorcing our choice of action from our choice of actor; of demanding economics opposed by economists, diplomacy opposed by diplomats, and ultimately governance opposed by anyone we might actually choose to govern.

Voters aren’t to blame for this. Offer them a stark choice between A and B, as David Cameron did, and they will reasonably, if wrongly, infer the existence of unseen mechanisms capable of delivering [either A or B]. Mainstream politicians, no matter that they didn’t want this mandate in the first place, are now doomed if they ever say so out loud, and so by default begin to talk absolute transparent bollocks.

As a result, honesty appears to become the preserve of a wholly new breed of politicians – basically activists – utterly unconstrained by the dull, practical compromises required to actually deliver anything.

This is where that Referendum left us. Not just with Reform UK, but with the Greens too. And with shrieking promises from politicians who are fully aware that the moment they actually win [an election], their first task will be to figure out how to break them.

All of which is absolutely spot-on. And, of course, the only reason Reform UK didn’t vote in Parliament for the EU Referendum in 2015 is that they didn’t yet exist – and so didn’t have any MPs or peers in Parliament at the time. But the Green Party did. And they – the supposedly cerebral Caroline Lucas MP and the certainly less cerebral (and initially pro-Brexit) Baroness Jenny Jones – not only actively campaigned for the stupendously stupid EU Referendum, but voted with their supposed arch-enemies – the Tories – to pass the stupendously stupid European Union Referendum Act 2015.

As early as October 2011, at which point she’d been an MP for all of 18 months, Caroline Lucas actively supported and then voted for a Commons motion tabled by the rabidly anti-EU Tory MP David Nuttall, calling for a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. And she did so because … “I am pro-democracy”.

The pro-democracy David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, Dominic Grieve, Chuka Umunna, Anna Soubry, Jo Swinson and even Michael Gove all voted against the nutty Nuttall’s nutty motion. But Lucas happily waltzed through the ‘yes’ lobby with avowed Brexiteers Steve Baker, Andrew Bridgen, Douglas Carswell, Bill Cash, Nadine Dorries, Kate Hoey, Andrea Leadsom, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Gisela Stuart. Cerebral? I think not.

Then, ahead of the General Election in May 2015, the Green Party campaigned on a manifesto pledge to “prioritise local self-reliance rather than the EU’s unsustainable economics of free trade and growth”. Which I think means ‘we’ll make you grow your own turnips’. And, one month later, the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas abstained on an SNP motion to deny the new Tory Government’s stupendously stupid European Union Referendum Bill its Second Reading (not least because “the Bill does not give the right to vote to 16 and 17 year olds or most EU nationals living in the UK”).

The SNP motion was defeated by 338 votes to 59. Evidently, the ‘pro-democracy’ and comfortably off Lucas was more interested in having a vote on Brexit than she was in enfranchising the 16 and 17 year olds who – unlike her – would have to live with the economic and social consequences of the result for the entirety of their adult lives.

Then, in September that year, the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas once again waltzed through the ‘yes’ lobby with the lovely Baker, Bridgen, Cash, Leadsom and Rees-Mogg – as well as Liam Fox, Mark Francois and Liz Truss – to give the Cameron-led Government’s EU Referendum Bill its Third Reading and send it on to the House of Lords, through which it sailed without a single vote. Well done, Caroline Lucas, Baroness Jenny Jones and the Green Party!

However, as you may recall, the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas didn’t like the result of the stupendously stupid EU Referendum she had stupidly campaigned for and voted to hold without the participation of 16 and 17 year olds. So in April 2018 she teamed up with Chuka Umunna (Labour), Anna Soubry (Tory) and Layla Moran (Fib Dem) to launch the People’s Vote campaign, with a view to having a second go at getting the people to vote the way she wanted. However, as I noted on this blog at the time, the Fab Four were never able to say what options would actually be on any ‘People’s Vote’ ballot paper, and in any case there simply wasn’t time for a re-run of the 2016 fiasco.

By August 2019, with the stupendously stupid People’s Vote campaign having inevitably hit the buffers, the avowedly inclusive Lucas moved on to proposing an all-white Cabinet of women – including Nicola Sturgeon, whose then husband has just been convicted of embezzling £400K from the SNP – to somehow sort Brexit. Unsurprisingly, that batshit crazy idea didn’t fly, so the ‘pro-democracy’ Lucas doubled-down by admitting she wouldn’t accept the result of any People’s Vote/second referendum if ‘the people’ didn’t vote the way she wanted. Democracy the Green way, innit.

Fast forward to 2026 and, needless to say, the Green Party would like everyone to forget its stupendously stupid encouragement and facilitation of the most damaging political decision in modern British history. As the Green Party’s new, populist leader David Paulden/Zack Polanski now says, Brexit was “one of the most catastrophic decisions this country has ever made”. It’s almost as if Paulden/Polanski is as cerebral as Caroline Lucas.

But I will never forget. And nor should you.