Westminster must not be allowed another messy exit — they did it once to India

Parliamentarians are not infallible and 1.5 billion people bear the scars to prove it

Westminster — the home of modern democracy? Going by performance, hardly.

What new angle can I spin on Brexit, a mere two weeks before March 29? It is simply to remind the British people, in case they had forgotten, that Westminster can’t be trusted to deliver, especially against a clock. The notion of having the world’s ‘impeccable democracy’ is flawed, if history is anything to go by.

I present to you the last great messy exit the British subjected themselves, and 400 million people to — Indian Independence and the Great Partition of 1947. Airbrushed in the West, most of all in the UK, it was the UK’s last messy exit from their most profitable trading partner (though India was hardly a partner — it was a colony) and pushed through with less than two years to build consensus. It was engineered by the Labour Government of the time. The cost in that instance wasn’t rising prices of Spanish tomatoes or tropical bananas imported via France — but 5 million lives, a bloody legacy the Indian sub-continent still grapples with and severed ties with their biggest cash cow.

The Indian example is instructive because of the undue haste in leaving the sub-continent — something even gung-ho Brexiteers have…