Jo Swinson has made great progress, but revoking Article 50 is a step too far

Editorial: The Lib Dems are pushing their luck. This plan fails to close the democratic circle left half drawn by the referendum of June 2016

The Brexit genie is out of the bottle – it cannot simply be wished away (PA)

Given the startling progress made since she took over from Vince Cable in July, it is perhaps not surprising that the Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson is getting a little ahead of herself.

In announcing a position of revoking Article 50 and not just “stopping Brexit” but cancelling it, she seems to be doubling down on her anti-Brexit credentials and appeal. Perhaps she has an eye on the 6 million or so who signed the Revoke Article 50 petition last year; they certainly outnumber the 3.3 million votes the Lib Dems picked up at the European elections in the summer.

Perhaps too she would like to strike an even stronger contrast with the tragi-comic contortions of Labour’s policy on Brexit, and the increasingly reckless Conservatives under Boris Johnson, rapidly becoming a subsidiary of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. It is a bold approach, and not without its risks for what is still Britain’s fourth party.

The price she has already paid, it would seem, is to rupture any possibility of building a Remain alliance including Labour at the next election.

There will be no explicit or formal cooperation with Labour on policy or on candidates, though some local parties might take a different view, and some voters will, at the behest of the people’s vote movement, take the opportunity to vote tactically. Yet the relationship between Labour and the Liberal Democrats’ leaderships will remain wary.

Ms Swinson has already rubbished the appointment of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of an interim government tasked with ending the Brexit crisis – and arrogantly too. As leader of the opposition and leading a Commons group roughly 15 times larger than Ms Swinson’s, it is Mr Corbyn’s constitutional right to attempt to form an administration. She has since backtracked, and made herself look a little foolish. Her latest move may also not suit her growing rapprochement with the Greens, the SNP and Plaid.

In truth, the Remain alliance was always a rickety and unlikely project, as anything that tried to accommodate Mr Corbyn’s dogmatic party, and the sometimes demanding Scottish Nationalists, might be expected to be.

A more fundamental objection to Ms Swinson’s approach is that it is extreme, and undemocratic. Unless the view is taken that the 2016 referendum was entirely and irredeemably crooked and corrupt – not outlandish but not yet proven – that mass democratic vote, once taken, cannot be simply wished away.

There was, and is, a large section of the electorate who wish to leave the European Union. Some of that number – the polls suggest – do support a no-deal Brexit, for whatever reason. Others do not. Still more are unsure, given that a deal, theoretically, might still be an alternative outcome, and they’d favour that.

What was always needed for any deal, or no deal, is for that Leave option to win the specific assent of the British people in a free and fair referendum, set against the option of Remain and with all we now know about the issues.

That is the logic of the first referendum deciding on the principle, but not the means or the terms of Brexit, if any. It cannot be fairly claimed that the 2016 result was a vote for any particular kind of Brexit, still less a necessary and clear mandate for a no-deal Brexit. That needs to be tested democratically. A general election cannot do so because it is asking the wrong question; a referendum can ask the right one.

Simply cancelling Brexit is a problematic solution to the problem. It fails to close that democratic circle, the one where sovereignty shifted to the people, at least on this issue, like it or not, in 2016.

Of course parliament has the ultimate role in determining the nation’s future, and should be viewed as sovereign and supreme. Yet the practical impact of the 2016 referendum was to tip the balance away from our traditional representative institutions and towards the exercise of direct democracy.

That cannot be superseded except by a similar popular mandate, one that the people have voted for. Of course a majority Lib Dem government could fairly be said to amount to the same thing – but it would not in fact be the same thing. The 2016 referendum and its consequences would remain unfinished business. Besides, Ms Swinson is unlikely to find herself in No 10 by Christmas.

The genie, so to speak, was let out of the bottle by David Cameron when he agreed to an in/out referendum in January 2013 (the idea having previously been a Liberal Democrat policy under Nick Clegg, though the party went cold on it in the coalition government).

So Ms Swinson is pushing her luck with her revoke pledge. Britain’s youngest and newest party leader has already added more to her party’s Commons representation than her predecessor, Tim Farron, managed in two years (he added four).

With by-election success and an impressive flow of refugees from the Conservatives, Labour and the various incarnations of Change UK, she heads a party of 17 MPs, up five on her inheritance in the summer of this year. No doubt more of the now sacked and resigned ex-Tory MPs looking for a political home might be willing to work with Ms Swinson’s party. What a fine thing it would be to unveil Amber Rudd as the latest recruit at the party conference.

Now, astonishingly for a party near-extinct in 2015, the Lib Dems are only a few points behind the Labour Party in the opinion polls. Ms Swinson has done very well in staking her claim to the European cause – a historic one for her party and its antecedents – and, so far, in making the democratic case for a Final Say referendum. Yet Ms Swinson should not get drunk on power yet. She should take care to ensure that her party remains as democratic in its outlook as it is liberal and internationalist.