The abuse Anna Soubry faced was ugly, but it shouldn’t dictate how we proceed with Brexit

Stephen Barclay’s utopian call for unity over the incident is out of step with reality. However Brexit pans out, the country will be painfully split down the middle for years

There will be more sporadic acts of violence, and it will be the justice system’s business to punish those the police cannot prevent (PA)

The identities of the charmers who serenaded Anna Soubry with the Nazi chant outside parliament on Monday evening are as unknown as their world views. But it feels like a fairly safe guess that, whoever they might be, few of them are gifted historians or suffer from a debilitating surplus of ironic self-awareness.

It would insult your intelligence, if not theirs, to belabour the distinctions between a socially liberal Tory centrist, and zealous devotees of the Fuhrer. Assuming these choristers’ political outlook tends towards the extreme right, the irony speaks equally well for itself.

I hope this doesn’t libel them in the same casual way they slandered Soubry. But to these ears they sounded eerily like those elements of the Stamford Bridge chorus who commit an indisputable hate crime once a year by welcoming Spurs fans with hissing in homage to the release of Zyklon B into the gas chambers.

People of the sort have always been among us.

In one sense, it is a vibrant affirmation of democracy that Brexit has widened their scope. Not so long ago, a ritual complaint about the state of British politics was consuming public apathy.

In another sense, you may be excused for fretting about how much influence such people should have over Britain’s destiny, and where the line between polemical invective and criminal abuse should be drawn.

Personally, so long as they limit themselves to cretinous chants, with no credible hint of violence, I think they should as far as possible be ignored.

“This is what has happened to our country,” said Soubry, smiling sadly at the interruption to her Sky News interview. But it hasn’t. This is what our country, with its small but disproportionately noisy sub-strata of the aggressively dim, has always been. They were easy to ignore when confined to football stadiums in the time before sophisticated policing. Even since the practise became well known, there have been no mass arrests.

It is harder to turn a deaf ear to them now that Brexit has drawn them into the political arena and amplified their voice. But democracy is not a pristine or elegant thing. It’s a filthy, lousy old beast which most of us resignedly reckon to be the least awful system on offer, and it levies various costs. One is allowing obnoxious idiots to say idiotically obnoxious things without rounding them up for spurious public order offences or alleged hate crimes.

Nothing aggrandises such people like a sense of martyrdom, or superheats their infantile resentments like the manipulation of the law to suppress what is, however distastefully indulged, their right to free speech.

Others disagree. After more than 50 MPs wrote to the Met, officers have been instructed to intervene. Coppers under intense media and political pressure always overreact.

The dividing lines between unpleasant chanting and threatening behaviour, between abuse on racial or religious or sexual lines and absurdist historical analogising, between defending MPs from physical menace and protecting their sensibilities, will be obliterated.

As for the extent of their influence on the future, we are no closer to a consensus on that. Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary in name alone, seems a model of deference to their muscular opinions.

“The issue of Brexit does provoke very strong emotions on both sides,” was his thrillingly insightful response to the Soubry incident, “and this is one of the reasons why … it is now time to come together in the national interest to get behind the prime minister’s deal.”

Someone, somewhere will be comparing him to Neville Chamberlain. However sick of the Third Reich analogising one might be, they have a point. You appreciate the duty of a loyal mutt whose portfolio begins and ends with parroting whatever scrap of gibberish No 10 tosses into his breakfast bowl each morning.

But even such a cosmically over-promoted hack should have the gumption to recoil from endorsing the appeasement of the far right in the doomed quest to resurrect the dodo deal.

For all the touchingly utopian optimism of the Barclay call for unity, there is no choice but to adapt to the reality. However Brexit pans out, the country will be painfully, rancorously split down the middle by the issue for years, if not decades.

There will be sporadic acts of violence, and it will be the justice system’s business to punish those the police cannot prevent.

But vicious disagreement and offensive name-calling is no threat to democracy. It is the ugly end of democracy, and wants managing with the lightest possible touch until it straddles the borderline with clear criminality.

A few days before Christmas, in as poignantly Dickensian a seasonal vignette as you could ever wish to avoid, a homeless man from Hungary died after collapsing within yards of where Anna Soubry was heckled on Monday evening.

Last February, another rough sleeper from another EU partner, Portugal, was found dead a two-minute walk away in an underpass by Westminster Tube station.

If the police, political class and media are by and large content to ignore suffering and tragedy on such a scale in front of their eyes, they should have the stomach to ignore raucous insults that belong in the dustbin of rank ignorance from which they came, but not in the courts.