Brexit need not be Farage's style of Brexit, says Douglas Carswell

Brexit does not need to resemble Nigel Farage’s idea of leaving the European Union, Ukip’s sole MP has said. Douglas Carswell also praised Gina Miller, the woman at the centre of the supreme court case to prevent Theresa May triggering article 50 without parliamentary approval.

The MP for Clacton told at a Guardian Politics Live event in Kings Cross on Tuesday night: “Brexit does not mean Nigel Farage’s vision of Brexit.”

Appearing on a panel with Miller and Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, Carswell appealed for what he described as a “new national consensus”.

“We need to try to draw people together. The referendum was quite divisive … [but] the poll was actually relatively close,” he said. “I’ve argued consistently that that means no one has carte blanche to rewrite things the way they want to rewrite them.”

The MP, who triggered a byelection in 2014 when he decided to leave the Tories, also said he did not want to live in a country where calls were made encouraging people to march on the supreme court. The supreme court’s 11 judges are deciding whether the government has the right to trigger article 50 without a vote in the Commons after ministers appealed against the high court’s ruling.

Carswell said: “I admire Gina for what she is going. It takes a certain something to put your head above the parapet on an issue like this.” He also said Theresa May was doing a “pretty good job … so far, so good”.

He claimed that negotiating new trade deals post-Brexit would be “relatively straightforward” despite admitting that the UK’s arrangements with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) came through our EU membership.

However, Miller argued that the UK had “not done trade deals for a long time” and lacked the expertise in Whitehall.

Thornberry said it was time for the government to come clean about the options for Brexit and how they would affect the economy: “The British public have had enough of being lied to.” She vehemently rejected accusations that Labour was partly to blame for the referendum being lost.

In response to a question from the audience about party unity, the shadow foreign secretary said the challenge to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership by Owen Smith was a “huge distraction”. “We are in the process of pulling ourselves back together again, but I think it was a wasted six months,” she said.

“The ill-discipline of some of our members of parliament is very unfortunate. The Tories fight worse than we do; it’s just that whenever we fight, we open our hearts and we bleed all over the newspapers. Every time we fight, everybody knows everything. I just wish we could have a bit more discipline – remember what we’re in politics for.”

Miller won the warmest applause of the evening for her argument that our political system needs fundamental change: “The snake-oil salesmen are setting up people for more disaster. Things will not get better; they will get worse before they get better. Everyone’s over-promising that they can get things right … All of politics should change.”