So, now you know. There you were, assuming that the 850,000 signatures on our Final Say petition came from members of the public – “the people”, so to speak. But the prime minister has told you how it really is. A referendum on the final Brexit deal would, she said today, be a politician’s vote, not a people’s vote. 

To be fair, she gave a good speech, overall, at the Conservative Party Conference. But on the referendum we disagree. As with many supposed facts our politicians have told us about Brexit, the maths here just doesn’t add up. Counting MPs is going to be quite important for the prime minister as she tries to get enough votes to force a deal through parliament. And we can safely say there aren’t 850,000 of them.

It takes real people to drive a campaign like Final Say. People want this to happen – and they’re signing our petition in the hundreds of thousands. It’s a huge number. It is a people’s vote.

There were an awful lot of predictions and promises from politicians during the first referendum campaigns - on both sides - that bear little resemblance to the facts that are coming into ever sharper focus. We’ve been told negotiations would be easy, and that we would soon be spending an extra £350m a week on the NHS and other public services. Now we all have a much better appreciation of reality, and soon we will have to see the final terms proposed for Brexit. 

Back in the real world, away from the political bubble of her party conference, the clock is ticking. As Theresa May admitted in the same speech, a no deal Brexit could happen, and that, as her business minister Clair Perry rightly said this week, is “a recipe for a catastrophic series of consequences”. No new options for compromise have been forthcoming, from the UK or EU teams.

Is that what you were sold at the 2016 referendum? Is that what the people want? And isn’t it at least worth checking, once we know what the terms of Brexit really are?

So, here’s what you can do to help put the people back in charge of Brexit: sign the petition if you haven’t already, share the petition with other people, and sign up to the March for the Future on 20th October (there's a full link to the details at the end of this post).

As our name suggests, The Independent is clearly not dictated to by politicians. Politicians and spads and chief whips are not running Final Say. We started this simply because we think it is the best option available, and so far around 850,000 people have backed it. But evidently we still need to make the message loud and clear: we’re calling for the people to decide our future, not the politicians.