Supreme Court: serving or subverting democracy?

I voted Remain in 2016, but I do not share the abject despair expressed by many Remainers when it comes to Britain's post-Brexit prospects.

Whichever side of the fence they sat on at the time, most people understood that the 2016 referendum was intended to be much more than an opinion poll.

It was a decisive exercise in which the will of the people would be respected. This was the avowed position of every major political leader, on both sides of the debate.

People did not vote on the assumption that Parliament would obey their instruction only if it saw fit.

They believed that, because Parliament answered to them, it would take the country out of the European Union, if that's the way the majority voted.

And that government would work hard to do this by the most expeditious and manageable way possible.

I doubt that very many Leave voters made this choice thinking that the process would be easy. A few perhaps, but not the majority.

Having first joined the European Economic Community, the precursor of the EU, more than 40 years previously, Britain could not expect to extract itself without patience and painstaking effort.

Many Leave voters, I suspect, imagined that there would be a few years in which difficult adjustments would have to be made. However, they would have felt that the long-term benefits of opting out would eventually outweigh any medium-term pain.

This thinking was especially understandable given the insecurity surrounding the Euro and mass migration crises, both of which provided a backdrop to the referendum - and both of which provided examples of poor EU leadership.

My own vote was cast with strong reservations regarding the proverbial elephant sitting in the EU's front room - the idea of "ever closer union".

It's only now, long after Britain's vote to leave, that some prominent European leaders have come completely clean about their desire for federalisation.