THE EVENTS of the past week have reminded all of us that whatever the strength of our feelings about Brexit there is one issue that is far more important... and that’s the future of our democracy.

It is, I admit, very easy to lapse into over-dramatic statements about violence in the street – as one anonymous cabinet minister did – but we are in worrying times, as MPs and High Court judges become the focus of public outrage.

It’s at times like these that they need defending.

They need defending first, because in my experience of Westminster, the overwhelming majority of MPs (from all parties) are hard-working and sincere in doing what they think is best for the country. They might get things wrong, occasionally act badly and make fools of themselves but few, very few, are malevolent.

Second, because after almost 50 years, the actual process of disentangling ourselves from a highly integrated union of 27 other countries is extraordinary complicated. The failure of our politicians, particularly Remain campaigners, to make this point clearly during the referendum campaign was a major shortcoming and is one of the main reasons why the public is now so frustrated .

Many of those MPs who have been trying to out-manoeuvre the Government in Parliament have been doing it not because they are trying to block Brexit altogether – although admittedly there are those who are – but because they realise how disastrous it would be for us to leave this complicated relationship with nothing in its place.

Mrs May also has to carry her share of the blame. When she took over from David Cameron and embarked on the Brexit negotiations, given the closeness of the referendum vote and the subsequent general election, she should have reached out to the other parties to try and fashion an approach to Brussels that would command support across the House.

She didn’t. Instead, dependent as she was on the votes of the DUP to stay in power, she turned to the extreme right of the Conservative party, the European Research Group, and sought to appease them at every turn.

When finally she did turn to the other parties, Labour in particular, she had locked herself in so tightly to her narrow negotiating position, her so-called red lines, that she had nothing to offer them.

There has also been a failure by much of the national press to explain just how complicated the negotiations would turn out to be. Instead, they have, for the most part, reduced the debate to crude headlines and name-calling – dubbing High Court judges as “enemies of the people” is one small but significant factor that has contributed to the current turbulence.

A major side-effect of this whole farrago might well be that the peoples of Northern Ireland and Scotland come to decide that there is a better future for them inside the European Union rather than inside the United Kingdom.

So where do we go from here, how does a government that has, frankly, expressed little interest in bringing the country together again, set about this task?

And here there’s no escaping Brexit. Our local Hove MP Peter Kyle, along with a colleague Phil Wilson, has come up with what I think is an ingenious way forward, and one that should satisfy all but the most hard-line Leavers and Remainers.

As readers don’t need reminding Leavers’ big complaint was that their vote to leave has not been carried out. Remainers say that nobody knew what “leave” meant when they voted back in 2016 (I, for one, certainly did not realise quite what a tangled web would have to be untangled).

The so-called Kyle-Wilson amendment is an elegant solution. It says that we should continue to negotiate a deal, whether it’s the May, Johnson or even a Corbyn deal, so that we would know what leaving actually entailed. But that deal would only be enacted if it achieved the support of the majority of the people in what’s called a confirmatory ballot. It would be a clear and simple choice because this time round it would be the end of a process not the beginning. A vote in favour of the deal could result in the UK leaving the EU in weeks.

One final point. Back in 1975 Britain voted by 67 per cent to 33 per cent to stay in the EU. Almost immediately a number of individuals and organisations began campaigning to get the decision reversed. No one at the time, or since, said people had no right to try and overturn the result, the right to oppose is an important part of our democracy. That right still exists and defending it is defending our democracy and that is even more important than leave or remain.

Ivor Gaber is Professor of Political Journalism at the University of Sussex and a former political correspondent at Westminster.