• IT is now evident that the process of leaving the European Union will take several years.

This means that anything up to three million of those who were eligible to vote in the 2016 referendum will have died by the time the referendum result is fully implemented and that of the 12 million or so UK nationals born since 1998 who were too young to vote in 2016, two or three million who in 2016 were teenagers who had grown up believing that European citizenship was their birthright will have been added to the electorate but not given a say in the alteration of their civil and political status.

Are we quite sure 21st-century democracy is an improvement on earlier versions?

AD HARVEY
N16