PAYING lip service to honouring the result of the EU referendum is one thing. Ensuring that the reasons for that vote are understood and the wishes of the majority who voted Leave are implemented is evidently another.

Too much of the left has remained on the back foot following the vote on June 23.

After a debate over membership in which right-wing arguments dominated — with too many Remainers appealing to free trade, global capitalism and the City, and too many Leavers scapegoating immigrants or whinging about common-sense regulation of consumer products and the workplace — it’s a missed opportunity that the labour movement hasn’t taken the initiative in the aftermath.

The left could do little about the mutiny by Labour MPs who revolted against their democratically elected leader when the Conservatives were at their weakest.

But that fight has been won — for now — and the Tories are hardly looking strong.

Unelected Prime Minister Theresa May is floundering, completely in the dark about how she intends to negotiate Britain’s exit and at loggerheads with half her parliamentary party and most of her front bench.

The resignation of Stephen Phillips leaves her with a majority of eight.

The High Court last week dealt her another blow, ruling — in a case privately financed by an investment banker — that Parliament would have to vote to invoke Article 50, which begins the departure process.

Excitable Europhiles say this is an opportunity to overturn the referendum result. The Scottish Nationalists and Liberal Democrats fully intend to vote against leaving. But MPs will not be forgiven if they opt to overrule the popular vote.

More people voted to leave the European Union than have voted for anything in Britain’s history.

To reverse that ruling because of constitutional niceties over the sovereignty of Parliament would be an anti-democratic disgrace, spelling electoral suicide and fuelling dangerous resentment.

The Labour Party leadership and most of the labour movement have made it clear that they will not seek to stop Britain leaving now the people have spoken.

And Jeremy Corbyn is right to use the High Court ruling as a platform for Labour to intervene decisively in shaping what the terms of our exit will be.

Our demands should be clear: we want a new deal for workers. That means tackling zero-hours contracts and insecure work, but it will also mean changing the direction of our whole economy — bringing our overpriced and creaking transport network into public ownership, nationalising the Big Six energy firms and funding local energy co-ops, investing in renewables to avert the clear and present danger of climate chaos, building council homes and controlling rents, and above all empowering unions to fight for working people.

We cannot do these things within the single market. EU regulations on competition and access for foreign firms will prevent renationalisation.

Trade deals such as the recently signed Ceta will stop us taking any action to protect our environment or “discriminate” by subsidising the fuels of the future.

It is disturbing that some in Labour and on the left are actually demanding continued membership of the single market, when staying in would massively curtail any socialist administration’s freedom of action and remove many of the potential benefits of leaving the EU in the first place.

Instead of begging May to preserve this or that relic of the anti-democratic monolith we have voted to leave, the left should set out a programme for the revitalisation of our economy and a better deal for working people, and base our exit negotiation demands on how in practical terms they will help us to implement it.