I READ with interest the piece by your columnist Vic Barlow about Kenneth Clarke’s views on the Brexit referendum debate.

Usually Mr Barlow’s singular take on life makes me smile and I fully realise that as a columnist he is obliged to take a personal and particular stance, sometimes for the sake of comic effect.

If I understand it correctly, Kenneth Clarke MP does not like referendums and MPs are not in office to reflect the views of their constituents but to make their own valued judgement on what is best for their constituents.

Mr Barlow doesn’t appear to like Mr Clarke’s stance and has extrapolated that Mr Clarke believes that the public are too stupid to be involved in constitutional matters, which should be left to him.

I take something of a different view. The rules of the game in a Parliamentary democracy are that your MP is your representative, not your delegate. You do not, and cannot, mandate an MP to vote a particular way on a given topic.

If you do not like the way he conducts himself in Parliament, you vote him out at the next election.

With regard to referendums, many readers of this newspaper have pointed out that a yes-no answer to a subject as layered and nuanced as our relationship with the EU was never going to bring a satisfactory answer, as has be proven.

I really don’t see how Mr Clarke’s stance in supporting Parliamentary democracy and opposing binary referendums could in any way be construed as the slippery slope towards a one-party state or that politicians’s don’t like democracy.

But we’re all entitled to our opinion, I just don’t happen to agree with Mr Barlow’s.

Paul Gallimore Address supplied