British hairdresser instructs lawyers and fights back: a referendum in which people are stripped of their rights is fundamentally wrong

Over the last couple of weeks I have ended up in one argument after another – yes, I occasionally still bother – with people who won’t see that a referendum in which people are or may be stripped of their rights by the outcome is fundamentally wrong. That is not democracy but its polar opposite. Democracy does not strip people of their rights. It protects them from attempts to do that.

I am astonished at just how many people lack the clarity of understanding to see that the Brexit referendum is one of those immoral and anti-democratic referendums in which one group of people vote to strip another group of people of their rights. The fact that they are also willingly divesting themselves of those same rights is irrelevant. You can’t tell somebody, “Hey, why are you complaining because I’m stripping you of the rights you’ve enjoyed so far? Look, I’m giving up those rights willingly myself.” That’s the illogical argument to end them all.

Because the majority of those who voted in the referendum for the UK to leave the EU voted for an end to the rights and freedoms they now enjoy as EU citizens, all others – including those who voted differently – are now to be stripped of those rights and freedoms against their will.

This is fundamentally wrong and is the essential crux of the matter. It is also the reason that there have been so many calls to have the vote overturned, over-ruled and undone. People understand, though they cannot articulate the reason why – the reason is that they are to be stripped of their rights and stripping people of their rights by popular vote is anti-democratic – that this referendum was deeply wrong.

The rights we enjoy as citizens of a European Union member state are not to be sniffed at. They are the envy of people across the world and the reason why Malta is, appallingly, able to sell Maltese citizenship to billionaires who have everything that money can buy – except (until now) EU citizenship.

The most obvious of these rights and freedoms are the ability to live, work and study wherever you please in 28 countries, on an equal basis with citizens of that country and without being made to feel that you are a guest – precisely because you are not a guest, but there by right.

There are many others, like access to EU funding, scholarships, EU programmes and the sort of opportunities that make the lives of young people today incomparably better to what the lives of my contemporaries were when we were young, wherever we lived in Europe.

You can’t use the popular vote in a referendum to strip people of those rights and freedoms. This should be immediately apparent and obvious, though clearly, lots of people need to think about it a little more and thinking is now highly under-rated.

I was delighted to read this morning that Deir Dos Santos, an ordinary UK citizen – what Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and other insufferably patronising gits like to call “the little man” – has instructed lawyers and is fighting back. He does not want to be stripped of the rights and freedoms he enjoys as a citizen of a European Union member state.

Dos Santos is not a City hotshot. He is a hairdresser
who is the first private citizen to take legal action against Brexit. The first hearing is on 19 July. His lawyer, Dominic Chambers QC, told Bloomberg that Dos Santos is “just an ordinary guy” and that “if his rights are going to be taken away, he wants it done in a proper and lawful manner”.

There’s more to read about this on Bloomberg.