Anne,

I am no representative of the Liberal Democrat party: my membership consists of paying my fees and advocating Liberal values to friends and family which include electoral reform, an intelligent welfare system, free markets, and an internationalist outlook which includes European membership.

So I am sorry to hear about your treatment by our colleagues: the politics of shame, aggression and the discounting of legitimate opinions is the politics I want to move away from. Those people represent the Liberal Democrat as much as I do: that is, they have their opinions and they believe this party is the best vehicle for them.

The same is true for membership of any party. I think our politics suffers when be imagine a uniform type of Tory, Labourite, UKIPper, or Lib Dem. That kind of imagination allows for the mass-casting of millions of individuals into roles they have not elected to be in: it is the same sad logic of any prejudice.

Close relatives of mine voted to leave. Their main fear was of ‘losing our Englishness’, a position of idealistic nostalgia which ignores the country Britain has become and attributes its division to ethnic and religious causes rather than political ones.

But there are economic and democratic grounds to leave Europe. It is indisputable: this is not a working union. It is not the union I want and I do not believe it is a union Britain or fellow Europeans want to continue into the future. Its inability to reform itself is compounding the failures of its currency, defence, and stimulus efforts.

My position is the same as that of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay: that a stable confederacy must be checked and balanced by the apparatus of a federal constitution. A European Union of 28 states is a natural extension of the principles which facilitate the fifty United States of America and the four nations of the United Kingdom: that a common faith in law, trade and democracy is more important than the petty divisions of day-to-day politics.

If these fellow members have insulted you for your opinions, then they are cowards of their conviction and clearly misunderstand the ideals they purport to represent.

It is in the spirit of these convictions that I ask you to reconsider: so far as I can see, the party has put forward two policy planks on Europe. The first is that in any negotiation to leave that we should be maximally tied to Europe, probably via the EEA, as you suggest: secondly, the party wishes to take us back into full European membership.

Not withstanding my own objections that the EEA is even less democratic than the current arrangement, that Britain will merely be a mid-size satellite to the global player of the European Union (and we will have no input into whatever that becomes), it seems that in the short-term your European interests may still lie with the Liberal Democrats. After we have left, you may find another, better fitting party.

But without electoral reform, I doubt it. If you are still a democrat; the fight for accountability and representation here in the UK is even more desperate than the fight in the EU. Here, our voices are unequal and the relative complexity of Liberal perspectives precludes the simple mass-messaging of the other parties.

This fundamental malfunction of our constitution means that although 52% may have voted to leave the union, there are any number of divisions within the population as to how we leave. If we leave it up to the government of Teresa May, which is split from unilateral separation all the way to remain, no Briton will have had a real say on what our country looks like in two years time.

I cannot ask you to rejoin on behalf of Europe: but perhaps you will continue to lend us your support, for the good of Britain?

Your fellow liberal and democrat.