Via the UK Daily Mail:
Today , for the second time in five months, a left-wing elite paid the price of ignoring, for many years, the warnings of civilised and tolerant conservatives. I cannot tell you how frustrating it has been, when trying to debate politics with readers of the Guardian and the New York Times.
To suggest to them that mass immigration is risky and destabilising; to urge that the married family needs to be supported, not dissolved; to say that education needs more rigour, discipline and selection; to advocate the deterrent punishment of crime rather than its indulgence; to suggest that pornography and swearing may damage civility; to object to attempts to abolish national borders and sovereignty; to say that violent liberal intervention in foreign countries is dangerous and wrong… any or all of these things has earned me a patronising sneer, a lofty glance, a dismissal as if I am some sort of troglodyte who has got into the room by mistake.
I said (as I recorded here a few weeks ago) to such people that they should listen to me while they could. I was content if they would only listen to me and moderate their policies. I did not even seek to wrest power from them, if they would only moderate their dogmatic revolutionary drive. I believed (and still believe) that they had made a mistake even on their own terms, that they could not possibly want the consequences of what they were doing. In the end, this was the Weimar Republic and they were courting a grave risk that they would eventually drive people too far. The response was sometimes personal abused, sometimes total, frozen indifference, very, very occasionally a brief, fairly uncomprehending attempt to see my point which came to nothing.
Well, now we have what I warned of. I don’t like these deep and increasingly spiteful divisions. I don’t like the crumbling of old constitutional conventions and the increasing treatment of opponents as enemies. I fear where this might lead. I have no desire to fight my fellow countrymen.
But all I can say is that I told you so. I cannot see what I can actually do, except try not to make things worse. Actually, my willingness to listen sympathetically to some of the worries of the Remainers has met with total indifference too. I doubt if one in a thousand of them even knows that I disapprove of the Referendum and that I think they had a case at the High Court. Even now they are so self-righteous they cannot imagine any opponent giving them the consideration they would never give in return. People who think their own opinions make them virtuous have the most closed minds of all. But I’ll carry on trying.