I shall say this only once. I have some sympathy with David Cameron not recognising what was coming down the track. It’s not just about the referendum itself. I still believe that he was wrong to go for a referendum after the 2010 General Election in a representative democracy, but there is another powerful factor in play which has become clearer in the years since the 2016 vote.

Six years is a long time in terms of the role of social media in the political arena. The polarisation of positions/opinions/allegiances has deepened in the UK partly because of an oversimplified binary vote and partly because of the corrosion and distortion which comes with certain uses of social media in the political or quasi-political realm.

When I became an elected representative fairly late in life (after a lifetime as an activist), I had a fairly settled view of what politicians were for. I saw them as people’s representatives who had some ability at explaining complicated stuff in relatively simple terms so that people were  better equipped to make some choices at elections. With this honourable understanding I can justify the shortest of Focus headlines and a press release which is well under half a page of A4.

I still buy into the basic model.  I am a kind of professional simplifier but the last few years have alerted us to the dangers of not giving sufficient recognition to the complicated reasons as to why people hold opinions which we profoundly disagree with or which fly in the face of expert opinion. Sonia Sodha, a distinguished leader writer for the Observer, encapsulated her view in a non-leader article with the headline “Question Time showed that you can’t counter anti-vax myths with cold reason alone”.

In mid-January Fiona Bruce had invited unvaccinated viewers to apply to be part of the audience for last week’s Question Time. Sonia argues that this decision was remarkably flawed and this was shown by the tone and content it generated. It had bought into the conventional wisdom that “on most issues people can be divided into tribes based on their fixed beliefs”. Seeing the unvaccinated as a group of people who have been “unrepresented” by the national broadcaster was a simplification too far.

Liberal Democrats have certainly benefitted from people holding conflicting beliefs at the same time. In December Helen Morgan won in North Shropshire because people in a Remain constituency were prepared to adopt a hierarchy of political priorities that matched their perceived needs on a particular occasion. In very different territory in 2018 some people said they disagreed with my views on Europe but were still prepared to vote for my re-election. I could do no other than respect this political maturity!

Perhaps I was rightly berated on this site for saying that leavers were conned during the referendum campaign. It might have been better to say that the country overall had been conned, or indeed, to settle for saying that I believed that Johnson, Farage and their ilk had fought a self-serving misleading campaign.

Just as people voted Leave for all sorts of reasons, so they do not become part of a tribe when they decline Covid vaccinations. They can range from full-blown subscribers to conspiracy theories to those who simply observe the bad reactions of others to a jab. My first vaccination left me more or less motionless for eighteen hours after I got home but that didn’t stop me looking forward to the second, and subsequently third, vaccination. I can understand why others would have some doubts after the first hurdle.

I found myself confronting the sharp end of the spectrum after delivering a leaflet to a man who appeared from behind the door “to have a word with a local councillor.” At one point, in a conversation that got weirder and weirder, he took umbrage at my innocently asking if he was a pandemic denier. He then started threatening me with physical violence. I got out of trouble by playing every personal safety trick I knew, including stepping into the road as he followed me along the pavement. Clearly in that situation just to continue listening would not have been helpful. But whether we be politicians or journalists or employers, the normal drill should be to listen to those whose views on a specific issue we find difficult to understand.

Lib Dems pride themselves on “listening to people”.  Whether we knew it or not in former times, any hint today that we are proclaiming “we know better” should be (ahem!) avoided like the plague.

* Geoff Reid is a retired Methodist minister and represented Eccleshill on Bradford City Council for twelve years