THE Brexit dust has still to settle and by all accounts it’ll take some time before it finally does.

It would be tempting fate to write anything about it at the moment because, sure as eggs is eggs, by the time you read it, the political whirlwind will have changed direction yet again.

What struck me perhaps the most is one extraordinary comment made during the campaign: ‘People in this country have had enough of experts…’.

Facebook is teeming with opinions on this: ‘…I’m certainly planning a private health plan for myself that will state that in the event of heart attack, cancer etc a non-expert will perform the required surgery on me. I’ve had it up to here with people who know what they’re doing,’ a friend of mine wrote sarcastically.

Humour aside, the campaign’s dismissal and discrediting of experts seems to have struck a deep public chord.

The world wide web has empowered us all. We are eyed suspiciously by our GPs when we turn up for our appointment armed with internet print outs. After the familiar ‘What seems to be the trouble?’, the doctor’s second question is often, ‘Have you any idea what it might be?’ I trained for three years to be a teacher.

At the time I believed that studying child development, education and undertaking supervised, reflective teaching practice would equip me with expertise that I could draw on in front of a class.

Today, that’s been denigrated; graduates in certain subjects can become teachers without any educational qualifications whatsoever.

And the course that we followed over a duration of three years, is now available as a one-year ‘on the job’ part-time course.

I once gave a lecture to a group of students on a subject I’d been researching for a while and on which I’d previously been published. I was considered a relative ‘expert’. I set out the evidence and invited the group to draw their own conclusions. One student hung around after the lecture. ‘I know what you’re saying,’ he said, ‘…and I know what the evidence says. But I just don’t agree.’ ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,’ said Mark Twain. ‘The truth is precious. Many politicians refrain from using the truth because that would cause a tax increase.’ But whatever we think of politicians the political process is one we should never take for granted.

I decided to vote after picking my 11-year-old son up from school so that he could see democracy in action.

The queues were long and while waiting, we chatted. He told me it reminded him of what they’d been studying in History – about the people of South Africa queueing for hours to vote for the first time after the ending of apartheid.

Fitting then, that his first experience of democracy was one that is likely to be just as nation changing.