There are a number of campaigns challenging the results of the 2016 referendum plus the recently announced NCA (National Crime Agency) investigation.

The issues that these campaigns are focused on are without doubt very important.

The various challenges have yet to get over the first, and very high, hurdle – will the court admit the challenge? Indeed one or more has been rejected by the courts at least once.

However, we have to prioritise the IMPORTANT and the URGENT.

If we are to neutralise or even mitigate the effects of the attack on our democracy, we need to prevent the forces of darkness pushing the UK into an uninformed Brexit – that is URGENT.

It is IMPORTANT that we prevent this happening again in the future. But if we fail to prevent the corruption of the 2016 referendum from dictating the immediate future of the UK, we will lose not just a battle but a campaign, and possibly the war.

Even more URGENT is the need to lobby our parliamentarians, persuade them to base their decisions on what is Best for the UK and support those parliamentarians who are prepared to take the position articulated by Edmund Burke in 1774:

“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

The will of the people is what it is on the day, it is neither immutable nor unchangeable. As David Davis said in 2012: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.”

Nobody voted for a future that impoverished the UK and its citizens, weakened its social services, its NHS, it social cohesion, its own union of nations – far from all that, the Leave campaigns promise was that the UK would be better off outside the EU.

This is why it is URGENT that we fight the self-serving and supposedly idealogical arguments from Theresa May and others.

The Leave campaign’s economist, Patrick Minford, said that Brexit would mostly eliminate UK manufacturing and increase wage inequality. He advocated a transition of around 10 years to help industry “adjust”.

Patrick Minford told the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in 2012: “It is perfectly true that if you remove protection of the sort that has been given particularly to the car industry and other manufacturing industries inside the protective wall, you will have a change in the situation facing that industry, and you are going to have to run it down.”

He echoed this in a piece in The Sun, writing: “Over time, if we left the EU, it seems likely that we would mostly eliminate manufacturing, leaving mainly industries such as design, marketing and hi-tech. But this shouldn’t scare us.”

Politicians and campaign groups must use the tools they have been provided with to prevent the self-immolation that the UK (Theresa May) seems intent on.

Once we have turned back this existential threat to what makes the UK great, we can then address the failings in the Union and the democratic system we rely on.

Some 1,500 lawyers have backed The People’s Vote campaign including some who have advised The People’s Challenge:

Sir David Edwards KCMG PC QC FRSE – Former European Court of Justice Judge and co-author of the Three Knights Opinion commissioned by The Peoples Challenge.

Helen Mountfield QC – Lead Counsel for our successful challenge to the Government’s intended use of Royal Prerogative to trigger Article 50 and a co-author of the Three Knights Opinion.

John Halford – Partner at Bindmans LLP who led our Article 50 challenge and the teams that produced The Knights Opinion and Millions in the Margins Advice.

Jolyon Maugham QC – Triggered the pre-action letter that led to The Peoples Challenge to the Government’s use of Royal Prerogative to make the Article 50 notification.

Between now and 29^th March persuading our parliamentarians to take decisions based on what is Best for the UK and its people is both URGENT and IMPORTANT.

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We value your support. Just keeping track of the campaigns and challenges that have objectives that match our own takes time and effort, much of what we do costs money that we can only afford to spend with the financial support of people like you.

Many people have contributed not once but multiple times and we know that there are practical limits on what people can do. Whether you can make a contribution (click on the image above) or not please spread the word among your contacts and on the social media.

Our aim is to help people see what’s going on, understand what they are, or aren’t, being told, and decide what is the best outcome for the UK: an outcome in the national interest, protecting fundamental citizenship rights and ensuring Parliament and not the executive is sovereign.

There is still a long way to go and there are no guarantees about what the outcome will be. The only thing that is certain is that if we stop trying we will lose.

To help protect our fundamental rights, and support Parliament in safeguarding them, please support us so we can maintain our campaign and make your voice heard.

Please share this article as widely as you can, thank you very much for your support.

Published by Grahame Pigney on behalf of The People’s Challenge Ltd.