From The Guardian. The problem with this I suppose is that a lot of MPs are arguably NOT better informed (Nadine Dorries, anyone?)

Blair says people should listen to MPs on Brexit because MPs are better informed than they are

Politicians should be ready to “stand up” to members of the public who brand them elitist because they argue for a second Brexit referendum, Tony Blair has said. Speaking at the launch of the annual Edelman Trust Barometer in London, he said people should listen to what MPs say about Brexit because MPs were likely to be better informed.

As the Press Association reports, Blair recalled an encounter with a member of the public in which he tried to explain details of the working of the EU’s single market and customs union which made him oppose Brexit, only to receive the reply: “You’re just trying to say to me that you know far more about this than I do.” Blair went on:

I was prime minister for 10 years.

I want to say to people, I follow Newcastle United, if a game is on the TV I will watch it, but I know that Rafa Benitez has forgotten more about football in one day than I will ever know.

It’s not because he is smarter than me - though he probably is smarter than me - it’s because that’s what he spends his life doing.

You send people to parliament and that’s their day job. It’s not your day job. So if they study the detail and say this is a bad idea, they are not squabbling children, they are doing what you sent them to parliament to do.

If you explain that to people they regard this as the elite fighting back. It’s absurd. We have got to have politicians who stand up and say ‘No, that is not a sensible way of looking at this’.

This is an argument contains an obvious truth, but it is not something MPs say in public these days - and even Blair would have thought twice about putting it in these terms when he was in the Commons himself. In the 1930s the Labour politician Douglas Jay famously wrote: “The gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.” But this quote became a byword for establishment hubris and ever since MPs have been extremely nervous about ever saying they are better informed than their voters.

Blair also said there was a need for a “muscular centre-ground” to provide evidence-based answers to issues such as immigration and the loss of jobs to robots on which populists thrive. But, as the Press Association reports, he shied away from saying whether this would require a new centre party, saying only: “My hope is that my party comes back to a centre-left position.”

Asked whether he was concerned about civil unrest if Brexit does not go ahead, Blair said:

If people are going to threaten violence you take a pretty strong line on that.

This ‘gilets jaunes’ politics - let them stand for election and then if they win we will take them seriously.

Why should you take them seriously because they put a brick through a shop window? We need politicians who are strong enough to stand up and say this.