It should help both of them. Since Montesquieu’s time, French stereotypes have credited British statesmen with wisdom and ruthlessness in the pursuit of economic advantage. Even 49 days of Liz Truss proved inadequate to shake them. Macron would like to lay claim to these Anglo-Saxon virtues as he leads the French through painful reforms to their welfare state. Starmer, meanwhile, gets further validation as Britain’s likely next prime minister: an important statesman will have anointed him.

At a time when British voters have felt increasing remorse over Brexit, a visit to the most important head of state in the European Union also allows Starmer to remind voters of the importance of “Europe”, and of his own foresight in backing Remain. At a conference in Montreal last weekend, he told an FT interviewer that the deal Boris Johnson struck with Brussels is “far too thin”, promising to renegotiate a closer trade relationship if he becomes prime minister.

But if that is Starmer’s reckoning, it may be a misjudgment. No one would call these halcyon days for the UK economy. But the idea that the country’s business climate is now uniquely bad appears to have been built from inaccurate data, according to revisions released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month. The economy has been growing, not shrinking. It has returned to pro-Covid levels. Today, the worst-performing economy in the developed world is not the UK but Germany, for decades the motor of EU prosperity.

Germany’s poor showing is instructive. The countries of the EU made it a priority actively to limit and complicate trade with Britain in the wake of Brexit, in order to send the message that good relations with Europe now require EU membership. But the UK is a large economy, and sending that message came at a high price for French fishermen and German car manufacturers. Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and what happened to Britain in the wake of Brexit happened to Germany, as the United States pressed it to substitute more expensive American natural gas for Russian, and to “de-risk” its trade with Chinese industry. That’s the world of “free” trade: there is a price for marching to your own drummer. The UK is not the only country in the West that is operating under these new rules.

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Britain has become much more insular in recent years. This does not mean it is complacent. On the contrary, it may be unduly demoralised. Misfortunes that look like glaring Tory policy failures — areas in which Starmer can make hay with almost any policy alternative — look far less bad in an international context. Britons may still be infuriated at Boris Johnson’s Covid misbehaviour. They should know, though, that from abroad, the media-driven investigations look like a hysterical overreaction. That a prime minister’s violating of a lockdown to celebrate a staffer’s birthday would rankle the public is understandable. That it would occasion the fall of a government is bizarre.

The British response to Covid was incompetent — but most people who kept abreast of continental news would have greatly preferred their local incompetence to the kind that prevailed in the EU. While people could stroll in fields and parks in the UK, Spain was a prison house. While British scientists were developing one of the world’s leading vaccines, France’s vaccine program, conferred on the Pasteur Institute, was an embarrassing washout for Macron.

Tory immigration policies look like another Brexit-era broken promise: The Government’s Illegal Migration Act, with its wacky-sounding idea of parking asylum-seekers in Rwanda rather than processing their claims, has wound up stymied in courts. The country is faced with an epidemic of “small boat” arrivals and rising migrant numbers. But Europe is faring worse. An immigration bill that Macron hoped would be the centrepiece of his government programme last spring is still stalled in the Senate.

“Europeanising” this discussion could, therefore, be a trap for Starmer. Yes, the Tories have screwed up. But the very outlandishness of the Rwanda plan sends a signal that someone in the party understands that the old paradigm has ceased to function. Starmer gives no such signals. His plans to staff up and improve claim-processing simply do not reckon with the extent to which Britain is out of room. His promises to “smash” the “criminal gangs” responsible for migration are misdirected. The public is not worried about the criminality of immigration; it is worried about the volume of immigration. The same goes for Starmer’s offer, in the spirit of “burden sharing”, to take some of the migrants now arriving on Italy’s shores. This, at a time when a half-dozen countries that are still in the EU — Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Latvia — say they want no migrants at all.

So while informally launching his election campaign with a visit to Paris appears to provide Starmer with an all-purpose policy stick for flogging the Tories, the experience of Brexit has left him with a difficult ideological hand to play. In the 2017 elections, in the wake of the Brexit referendum, Jeremy Corbyn ran what may have been the most brilliant national campaign since the Second World War. De-emphasising the opposition to Brexit that had come to dominate the Labour Party, the leftist pariah came within a whisker of toppling Theresa May and moving into No. 10. Yet two years later, Corbyn ran at the head of Labour’s worst showing since 1935.

What happened? Observers tend to focus on Dominic Cummings’s brilliance in reconfiguring Tory personnel and imparting Tory ideology, but Labour had something to do with the result, too. Basically, in the two years after Corbyn’s Brexit-neutral campaign, the party revealed itself as obsessed with getting rid of Brexit, by hook or by crook. Starmer himself was an enthusiastic supporter of a second referendum; Labour looked like a party of broken promises.

A lot of French commentary on Starmer has focused on how this ardent Remainer has made Brexit “un concept tabou”. It is not so mystifying. He is attempting to win 2017 results for Labour while running on its 2019 programme. That is why Starmer’s rhetoric on Europe has this stilted, abstract, impersonal sound. “There is no return to freedom of movement,” he has said. “We have left the EU.” Starmer discusses Europe the way Bill Clinton discussed extramarital sex during his scandal-peppered presidency — studiously avoiding discussion of what he has done and what he would do. Sex, or Europe as the case may be, just blows across the landscape in his vicinity, like a weather system.

Former chief European Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier told a British audience last winter: “The EU is no longer what you left.” Barnier meant this as a boast. New bonds of mutuality tied the various countries together, above all the massive Next Generation EU borrowing programme. But a person of British sensibilities would probably think this was worse. Thus far, Next Generation EU has disbursed little money. It has mainly been a tool for disciplining refractory countries like Italy and Poland. The EU has other such tools, and it is not shy about using them. The bloc offers even less scope for sovereignty than it did in 2016.

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It’s a commonplace among Brexit foes that any return to the EU would take a lot of time. For instance, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland, while believing the public has decisively repudiated Brexit, is not optimistic the country could be readmitted before 2036. A more likely Rejoin scenario would involve suddenness and an element of surprise — say, after the arrival in Westminster of an unexpectedly large anti-Brexit majority. But the plan would need to have been drawn out beforehand, and it would need a powerful European interlocutor who could ensure a positive European reception — a French president, say. And yet, as one observes the care with which Starmer is discussing these things on the eve of his first big foray into Europe, one is drawn to a surprising conclusion: Feelings about Brexit have shifted much less in the seven years since the referendum than Starmer’s more zealous supporters wish to think.

Brexit is possibly the most significant uprising in the capitalist West in the last 75 years — the reclaiming of sovereignty from a technocratic system. The people at the top of that system drew great benefits from it; their efforts to obstruct Brexit were not surprising. But the beneficiaries of the new system, whatever it is, are not people of power. They don’t think of themselves as beneficiaries of anything. Today they are grumbling. But once voters begin to focus on the concrete issues surrounding it, as they inevitably do in the course of a national election, politicians will discover that Brexit is still a dangerous issue. It may even still be a winning one.

And yet, at the same time, my heart sinks. You see, this isn’t just any royal tour — it’s a rescue mission. The itinerary takes in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize — all countries where Her Majesty the Queen happens to be head of state. But for how much longer?

Last year, Barbados declared itself a republic — and so it looks like Kate and Wills have been dispatched to shore-up the remaining monarchies in the region. Officially, the tour is about environmental issues, but no one’s fooled. This is very obviously a royal version of Operation Save Big Dog. And I’m not sure that’s at all wise. 

For a start, it raises the temperature. One moment, you’re a Bahamian or a Jamaican getting on with your day, the next a British Prince turns up and suddenly you’re forced to question why you have foreigner as a head of state.

Meanwhile, back home, all the wrong people will be milking the issue. That small band of fervent Remainers who take unwholesome pleasure from any hint of British humiliation will be overjoyed. Last week, they enjoyed a cheap thrill when the Russian foreign minister monstered Liz Truss in Moscow; so imagine what they’ll make of Prince William begging for his granny’s job in Jamaica. The spectacle of the Queen getting the sack from multiple countries would suit the declinists down to the ground. So much for Global Britain, they’ll chirp.

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The solution, of course, is not to rise to the bait. That isn’t to say we should applaud the end of monarchy in Her Majesty’s far-flung realms; but we must accept that any such decision is none of our business. Indeed, Brexiteers, more than anyone, should support the right of a country to assert its independence in whatever way it deems appropriate. 

Besides, there’s nothing new to see here. Most of the nations that have gained their independence from Britain opted for their own heads of state. Some of them took their time getting around to it. The Maltese waited ten years, the Sri Lankans 14 and and the Mauritians 24. When Barbados became independent in 1966, the island’s first Prime Minister warned against “loitering on colonial premises after closing time”. But, in the event, the Barbadians waited 55 years.

I don’t blame them for hesitating. Having a head of state is an awkward business. Do you go for a powerful, but potentially polarising, figure like the Americans? Or do you go down the purely ceremonial route and end up with some has-been politician or boring academic? It’s no wonder that monarchy retains its sparkle. 

However, if you haven’t got a royal family of your own, where do you get one? Newly sovereign nations used to borrow minor royals from other countries. Today, Harry and Meghan might fancy a crack at Canada, but sadly the royal transfer window has long since closed. And so, for fourteen countries — from Antigua and Barbuda to Tuvalu — the default option is to carry on with the same monarch as the British. 

Which is fine, I’m sure we don’t mind sharing. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that this isn’t an deeply odd arrangement. In fact, it’s very nearly unique. Apart from Elizabeth II, only one other person in the world today serves as head of state in more than one country: Emmanuel Macron, who by virtue of being President of France is also a co-prince of Andorra.  

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So if any or all the remaining realms opt for a more conventional arrangement, we shouldn’t take it personally. Replacing the Queen with someone who actually lives in the country is part and parcel of expressing sovereignty.

Yet sorting out a local head of state isn’t the only piece of post-imperial paperwork to be dealt with. The constitutional relics of the British Empire can be found across the world. Take the Union Jack, which can still be found on the flags of four sovereign nations besides the UK, not to mention several Canadian provinces and Hawaii. It would be understandable if these nations and territories wanted a flag of entirely local design. In fact, that’s what the New Zealand government proposed in 2016, though it was rejected in a referendum.

But if they ever change their minds, then, again, we Brits shouldn’t take it personally. One of the things that most annoyed Brexit voters in 2016 was the EU’s fatuous habit of stamping its flag where it wasn’t wanted — on our passports, on our number plates and on public works built with our money. I’m delighted that other countries have freely chosen to make the Union Jack their own; but should they come to think differently, then a redesign wouldn’t just deserve our understanding, but our respect. After all, we didn’t mind when the Canadians changed their flag in 1965.  

Indeed, contrary to the ravings of progressive ideologues, the British are far from obsessed with the Empire. It is the contemporary Left — not the Right — that can’t let the past go. Yet there is one thing that both sides still fail to understand, which is that the post-imperial era is also heading into the rear view.

As we’re discovering with Brexit, breaking free from a deeply embedded political order takes place suddenly in some respects and gradually in others. But while a transitional phase is inevitable, it is not interminable. Sooner or later, the new order is complete. From that point, it is time to look to the future.

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We therefore need to think about our post-imperial institutions — and especially the Commonwealth. The organisation was created as a successor to empire, a way of fostering relationships with and among newly independent nations. But in the years and decades ahead, the living memories of that time are destined to dwindle away — a fact that will be painfully underlined when our Queen’s long reign comes to an end.

So while there’s every good reason to cultivate friendships between nations tied together by family, language and common values, basing that community on a long defunct empire is going to become irrelevant. If it is to survive for longer than the monarchies of the Caribbean, the Commonwealth will need to move on. The membership of Mozambique and Rwanda, neither of which were ever part of the British empire, should be taken as a precedent not an exception. 

George VI was the first head of the Commonwealth. His daughter was the second; Charles will take over when the time comes. It is an extraordinary thing, based on nothing more than the continued respect of 54 independent and equal nations for one family. How long will that respect endure? There’s something for William to think about while he plays with his son on the beach.

When Parliament then refused to pass the deal the following spring, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser and ambassador to Paris, claimed that May’s last-ditch appeal to Brussels for more time was “perhaps the greatest humiliation for a British prime minister since the Suez crisis… When can a British Prime Minister have cut such a lamentable figure at an international meeting?” Good question.

While a few Brexiteers have also made the link (Boris Johnson once said that if May’s deal went through, it would be “the greatest national humiliation since Suez”), the parallel has mainly attracted Remainers. It’s not hard to see why. While some are old enough for it to have been the defining moment of their youth, for others, it is simply a sophisticated way to state their prejudice that Leavers ignorantly voted for some sort of splendid imperial isolation — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Robert Saunders.

That has not stopped the FT journalist Philip Stephens from arguing (in his recent book, Britain Alone) that “Brexit, like Suez, was an attempt to chart the future by reaching back into the halcyon days of history,” the triumph of “an appeal to nostalgia over reason”. And David Lammy, who has accused “hard Brexiteers” of:

“still mourning Suez, Britain’s last fling of the colonial dice. Back then, Anthony Eden failed to recognise that Britain was no longer capable of launching a solo imperial adventure. Let us not fall for the same hubris today.”

But contrary to this stereotype, the Suez Crisis was not a lonely, self-inflicted error brought on by nostalgia. The reality is more complex and far more interesting.

The Suez crisis began, perhaps, at the UN’s General Assembly of 1955, when the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, extolled “the immense benefit the British Empire had been and was” in a conversation at the UN with the British foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan. The two men were bemoaning the recent decision by Egypt’s Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to buy weapons off Russia, after balking at the conditions the United States would attach to such a sale. The Americans had supported Nasser’s coup, but as their client turned against them, Dulles asked Macmillan “if we had enough troops to reoccupy Egypt”. Macmillan thought Britain had.

Once, it would have seemed impertinent to ask such a question. But Britain had emerged from the war deeply in debt; since the sterling crisis six years earlier, the nation had been in dire financial straits, because of an unsustainable balance of payments. After the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Macmillan had privately compared the cabinet to the “directors of a rapidly deteriorating concern. They dare not tell the shareholders the facts”.

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A few months before Dulles and Macmillan spoke, Churchill — winged by a stroke in 1953 — had finally shuffled off into retirement. He was succeeded by his impatient understudy, Anthony Eden, who was also in no great shape: due to a bodged gastric operation, he was plagued by chronic pain. Macmillan’s report of Dulles’s sly enquiry as to whether Britain might intervene triggered a splenetic prime ministerial rant. “The big interest in the Middle East is ours, not America’s,” he said, annoyed by what he saw as the consequences of a cack-handed American intervention. “We are dependent on Middle East oil.”

The dependence was not just economic but financial: Eden was referring to the fact that the oil produced by Iraq and Kuwait was priced in sterling — a legacy of the fact that both countries, though never British colonies, had formed part of Britain’s informal empire. The Bank of England could always print currency to afford it, while sales to other countries provided a welcome boost to Britain’s holdings of foreign currency. The comparison of Suez and Brexit breaks down because in 1956 nostalgia played no part in British calculations. They were guided by fear of losing an ongoing advantage.

That fear had an important consequence. Based on another claim of Eden’s, that the “US has almost always been wrong about the Middle East”, the minutes of the meeting record an important decision: “We should not, therefore, allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support.” In mid-October, the British government made a crucial move. Without warning the Americans, it authorised military action to remove a Saudi force from a remote oasis, where it was preventing British oil exploration in Oman. The US had significant financial and strategic interests in Saudi Arabia, but the British found Dulles’s reaction, when he was belatedly told about the fait accompli, encouraging. He “did not like the news”, recalled one diplomat, “but he was not unpleasant about it.”

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The “Buraimi incident,” as this altercation was known, seemed so obscure as to be laughable at the time (it was the subject of a Goon Show sketch), but it set a precedent. Buoyed up by the ease with which they had routed the Saudis, the British now sought to press home their advantage by encouraging Saudi’s northern neighbour, Jordan, to join a regional military alliance with Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact. The heavy-handed British approach backfired and, barraged by incessant Egyptian radio propaganda, in March 1956 the king of Jordan sacked the British head of his armed forces, John Glubb, following rioting. Eden believed Nasser had engineered this coup. If Suez is a formative influence on today’s Remainers, then Eden had been scarred by Munich. Fearing the consequences of failure to deal with the Egyptian leader before he became too powerful, he told a close adviser: “It is him or us, don’t forget that”.

It was not just the British attitude to Nasser that was hardening: so was the United States’. In the spring of 1956, Dulles began talking of “ditching” Nasser; like FDR before him, and Donald Trump more recently, President Eisenhower was keen to swing his country’s support behind the Saudis, who had started to see the Egyptian’s republican ideas as a threat. The previous year the United States had promised to lend Nasser millions of dollars to enable him to build a new dam at Aswan. On 21 July, Dulles announced that the United States was pulling the loan. Nasser responded days later by announcing that he was nationalising the Suez Canal.

Eden felt his convictions about Nasser had been vindicated. The idea that he was alone in this — that Britain was isolated in its approach — is groundless. When news of Nasser’s move reached London, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Said, happened to be in Downing Street at a dinner and worried that Nasser would only be emboldened by the takeover. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit him hard and hit him now. … If he is left alone, he will finish all of us.” So worried was Nuri by the news of the canal’s takeover that he even suggested encouraging the Israelis to invade Egypt.

Since being forced out of Palestine by a Jewish insurgency eight years earlier, however, the British had only the most perfunctory relationship with Israel. It took an old rival, and old ally, of Britain to bring the crisis to a head. Not that anyone, in drawing parallels with Brexit, would admit that France had anything to do with Suez.

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Unlike the British, the French had a strong relationship with Israel, and a direct imperial interest, since Nasser was supporting the insurgency in French Algeria. They opened secret talks with the Israelis that autumn. In mid-October, French representatives presented their idea to Eden: Israel would invade Egypt, giving Britain and France grounds to go in and order both sides to retreat from the canal. Precisely because he was unwilling to go it alone, Eden leapt at the French proposal. To allay old Israeli suspicions of Britain, the secret protocol summarising the arrangement was signed by representatives of the three conspiring powers. Madcap plot it may have been, but Suez was never a solo British plan.

The Israelis invaded Sinai on 29 October. The following day Britain and France, as they had secretly agreed, issued ultimatums to both Israel and Egypt and landed troops in Port Said on 5 November. The collusion was not hard to see, and under immense international and — more importantly — financial market pressure, which threatened to drain Britain’s remaining reserves, the two European powers were soon forced to abandon their military operation. The truth is that Britain lacked the confidence in 1956 to act alone. But had she done so, she might well have got away with the deception: it was high-altitude photos of French jets on Israeli runways that alerted Washington to exactly what was going on.

A sense of vulnerability led Britain and France to lash out. Britain, which owed millions to Washington, looked towards its creditor. France, on the other hand, turned to Europe as a way to preserve her empire from American predation. These complexities — in particular the role of money — are lost in the comparison of Suez and Brexit. But then its chief purpose has not been honest, but to denigrate the intelligence of Leavers.

Of course, the first instinct of a writer is to stick your nose into other people’s business. There is no point in bemoaning this, but it can have unpleasant manifestations, in the way they criticise, judge and misrepresent those around them. The same thing applies, to a certain extent, when people write about countries other than their own.

When I first arrived here, I tried to focus on foreign reporting, by challenging hysterical Western perspectives of Poland. The Government and, sometimes, the people here are often portrayed as being backwards and xenophobic — and I objected to such characterisations. To the extent that Poles are more right-wing than Western Europeans, moreover, I argued, they have the right to be. A lot of American and British commentary appeared to embody what the social scientist Richard Hanania calls “woke imperialism” — the aggressive promotion of progressive pet causes in countries where there is little appetite for them.

I take none of my criticisms back. But on the flip side, it would be unfair of me to obscure the existence of Polish progressives, who have more right to make prescriptive judgements about their homeland than I, an immigrant, do. On the fringes of Right-wing Western opinion there is a caricature of Poland as an ever-strengthening, “BASED”, traditionalist Catholic idyll — leading one conservative commentator from the USA to claim that “the mood [in Warsaw] is unmistakably buoyant”, as if Polish public opinion is not as divided as anywhere else — and I have no wish to feed such clichés. To be a valuable observer you must tell the whole truth and not just part of it.

You must also bear in mind our view of foreign lands tends to be a matter of ideological projection. Nations which appear to represent our beliefs are happy, thriving sunlit uplands, where the rain never falls. They are often presented in striking contrast to one’s own bleak, grimy, cloud-ridden homeland. Communists romanticising far-flung revolutions are an obvious example: Malcolm Caldwell, a British academic who idealised Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, was invited to Phnom Penh and then murdered by the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps, in their paranoid bloodlust, they mistook him for an enemy.

But there are less blatantly irrational examples. Consider how British advocates of remaining in the European Union portrayed continental Europe as a saner, smarter, more compassionate place — less because they were interested in life there, and more to make a comment on Britain. John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do It Better, which bore the insufferable subtitle Notes From a Grown-Up Country, was essentially a book-length stick to beat Brexiteers with. Kampfner contrasted Britons’ “monolingual mediocrity” with Germans, who are “taught two languages at school”. A moment’s thought should have made it obvious that British people are likelier to be monolingual than Germans not because they are less curious and cosmopolitan but because English happens to be the lingua franca in modern Europe.

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A more comic case is provided by a man who call himself RS Archer on Twitter. Archer, who is nearing 100,000 followers, claims to be the author of the “David Saunders” book series (which does not exist). He has constructed a fantasy life as an English expat in France, satisfying Remainer prejudices with his tales of civilised bourgeois domesticity in the Dordogne — all wine, snails and jolly local mayors, and the stupid, backwards Brexiteer tourists who bother him. Perhaps “Archer” does live in France (and he certainly has the right to anonymity) but he is not interested in France as it is but as Remainers imagine it — as, in other words, the antithesis of England. They want to sink into a warm bath of oikophobia with a cool glass of “1983 Case Basse di Gianfranco Soldera Brunello di Montalcino Riserva”.

When a country defies our ideological preferences, of course, we cannot hear enough about what a cruel and benighted place it is. A telling example of the sort of credulity this encourages emerged during the Trump years. In perhaps the most outrageous case, an award-winning reporter for Der Spiegel, Claas Relotius, was found to have “falsified his articles on a grand scale”. Relotius’s pieces, many of which explored life in Trump’s America, contained such comically obvious fabrications as a town in Minnesota having a “Mexicans Keep Out” sign on display. You would think Relotius could never get away with printing such unbelievable stories, but he did, for years, because he told his audience what they wanted to read.

And when a reporter for the Right-leaning Wall Street Journal went looking for horror stories in Sadiq Khan’s London, meanwhile, he amusingly mistook an “alcohol restricted zone” sign in Whitechapel as evidence of Islamic rule in the British capital. Unlike in the case of Claas Relotius, this appears to have been an innocent mistake, but it illustrates the dangers of projecting your expectations onto a place.

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Accuracy may be a difficult standard to reach, given the incentives against it, but it is also a basic one. A more difficult problem is whether it’s justifiable to make value judgements about nations that are not your own. Almost no one is a pure cultural relativist; can anyone, for example, observe Kim Jong-un’s North Korea with ice-cold detachment? But a newcomer to a country should not dictate how it should be run, as if there is a single means of ordering societies and their enlightened perspective transcends that of their hosts.

Consider the beleaguered Americans. They have had to watch the English Piers Morgan tell them to give up their guns, the English Milo Yiannopoulos tell them who to have as president and the English Prince Harry lecturing them on the First Amendment. (The poor souls even have to deal with James Corden obstructing traffic.) It seems like you can’t turn on the TV in the US without hearing an English voice telling you what to do and what to think, which must be grating if you have no platform from which to project your American opinions about your own country.

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An outsider’s perspective can be valuable, inasmuch as if offers a sideways look at familiar problems. And of course, observers can become participants, visitors settlers. It would be wrong to think that a migrant cannot — like a native — love and criticise a country simultaneously. Peter Robb’s Midnight in Sicily, for example, combines social criticism with a deep affection for the people and culture of the mafia-assailed island, to beautiful effect.

As for me, I hope to write more about Poland, but as someone who is learning rather than lecturing. To do otherwise would be to do a miserable disservice to the many varied people who have helped me feel at home.

Humility is key — a humility which never places judgement before knowledge, nor assumes that one’s preferences must take precedence merely by the fact of being one’s own. That does not mean saying what you do not believe — an act which would be worse than saying nothing at all — but being careful with when, how and how much to say it.

What little manufacturing that the North and Midlands had held on to was expected to collapse as barriers to trade went up. Vengeful Remainers were especially looking forward to the comeuppance of Sunderland — the city that delivered the knock-out blow to Britain’s membership of the EU. Good luck holding on to your Nissan car plant, suckers!

But five years on and Nissan is still here and expanding. A billion pounds is being ploughed into the production of electric vehicles and the batteries are included — Nissan’s partner, Envision AESC, will be building a ‘gigafactory’ to produce them. Vauxhall, meanwhile, is investing a hundred million into its Ellesmere Port plant. The factory will produce electric vans — for which demand is soaring. And there are reports that the British Government is working with Tesla to find a UK site for a major manufacturing centre.

Whatever one thinks of Brexit, these are developments that everyone should welcome.

But Britain wouldn’t be Britain without its moaning minnies. And there are two sets of people who aren’t happy: firstly, the hardcore Remainers for whom any assertion of the British national interest is pure jingoism; and secondly, the free market fundamentalists for whom any government intervention in the economy is a slippery slope to the Seventies, if not downright communism. 

There’s a lot going on to raise their hackles. The Nissan and Vauxhall deals won’t have happened without the Government fronting-up a portion of the overall investment. Last week, the ministers moved to sweep away the EU rules on state aid that stand in the way of further state subsidies. Ministers also decided to keep the trade restrictions that help protect the UK steel industry from cheap imports. And then there’s the National Security and Investment Bill, which was introduced last year to protect British companies from “malicious” foreign investors. 

Meanwhile, Labour is trying to get in on the Government’s act: Keir Starmer has unveiled a Buy British plan to bolster companies through public procurement. 

Critics on both Left and Right see any turn towards “economic nationalism” as a bad thing. But does it have to be?

If you believe in a borderless world in which we have no special loyalty to our compatriots, then any kind of nationalism is bad. But if, like most people, you do believe in the nation state — and that a national government should put its own citizens first — then what is wrong with nationalism in the economic sphere?

The most obvious answer is that free trade is a good thing — and that Britain should not disrupt the level playing field of international competition. It’s a nice theory, but it ignores the fact that the playing field is anything but level. British industry is fighting an uphill battle, because our competitors have no qualms about tipping the terms of trade in their favour. Just look at export-led economies like Germany and China.

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Both of these countries benefit from rigged exchange rates. In Germany this is achieved through the single currency. If the Deutschmark were still around, you can bet that it would be trading at a much higher value against the Pound than the Euro does. This would make German exports a lot less competitive. As for China, it builds up enormous foreign currency reserves, while restricting access to its own currency. The result is a mismatch in demand that skews the exchange rate to the advantage of Chinese exporters.

There are other weapons in the armoury of the economic nationalist. For instance, EU figures show that, as a percentage of GDP, state aid to German industry is more than three times what it is Britain. Subsidy levels are also high in countries such as Hungary, Czechia and Poland — all of them key export markets and cheap labour suppliers for German industry. China subsidises its industries too — through direct support, access to low interest loans and crazy levels of infrastructure spending. It also protects its businesses from foreign competition while enjoying open access to western markets. 

So when the economic globalists talk about free trade, they don’t mean free trade at all. They mean that we should we leave ourselves wide open to the rampant economic nationalism of other countries. 

But so what? If these countries want to sell us their stuff at a knockdown price, then don’t we benefit? Let the Germans and Chinese do what they do best, while we concentrate on what we do best. That way we’ll all get richer. 

Except that we haven’t got richer. Not lately. The UK in particular has suffered from more than a decade of low growth. In terms of GDP per head we are bottom of the league of north European countries (a comparison that was gleefully seized upon by the SNP to make the case for Scottish independence). As for the rate of productivity improvement — on which all prosperity ultimately depends — we’re doing the worst out of the biggest western economies.

The free marketeers have got some explaining to do. This country has done more than most to follow their ideological prescriptions. We’ve thrown open our borders to the flow of goods, services, capital and labour. We’ve allowed foreign interests to buy up our companies and our property. Our public procurement policies emphasise value for money not buying British. For decades, we barely bothered with an industrial policy — and left business investment up to the private sector. And furthermore we’ve encouraged that investment with lower taxes and lighter regulation. 

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Why, then, aren’t we more productive?

But let’s not just look at the British economy in the abstract. We must also count the human cost. A low-skill low-wage economy comes at a terrible price to pride and hope. That’s especially true when these patterns of work define entire communities and regions. We should, of course, be thankful that we have a job-creating economy, but quality matters as well as quantity. 

The fact is that a policy of economic disarmament — of leaving Britain undefended against the economic nationalism of our competitors — has only delivered prosperity and wellbeing to some of our people. And that is not enough. British voters are demanding more, which is why our Government has tentatively embarked upon a policy of economic rearmament. Above all, this means doing what it takes to build up industries that provide high quality jobs. 

The sceptics will argue that the British economy is perfectly capable of doing that already. For instance, Julian Jessop in the Telegraph holds up the example of the UK’s tech sector. Britain is now home to more than a hundred tech companies worth more $1 billion. This is “a larger number than the rest of the Europe combined”, he says. No need for continental-style industrial policies, then.

Except that key centres of innovation — like London’s Silicon Roundabout — have benefited greatly from government programmes. Public funds have been been ploughed into the capital’s infrastructure — and also into Britain’s world-beating universities. The achievements of our tech entrepreneurs should be celebrated, but their industry has been supplied by the state with the vital resources of connectivity and brainpower.

There’s no reason not to give other strategically-important industries what they need to succeed too. What some industries require may be more specialised than others but the principle is the same. If individual companies can’t bear all the costs and risks involved, then there’s a case for government shouldering some of the burden.

Since the public purse is not bottomless, funds should be deployed where they will make the most difference. However, unlike a private investor, government has the ability and the duty to consider more than just the financial bottom line. Above all, there is goal of providing satisfying, well-paid work not just in some places but throughout the nation. 

In the end, that is what economic nationalism comes down to: economics as if every Briton matters. 

When their small boat left the continent last week, the weather was relatively calm. But half way across the channel the wind picked up and the crossing was terrifying, waves crashing over the side of the boat. I doubt their young daughter — seven perhaps — will ever forget it.

I’m not interested in arguing the toss about the rights and wrong of taking a young girl on so perilous a journey. Those of us who have safe and comfortable lives over here should listen more and talk less. The parents who turned up at my church were clearly fighting for their daughter’s future in the way they thought best, and that is a parent’s job. Stuff your politics if you disagree. Humanitarianism trumps politics.

Save The Children estimates that over 200,000 unaccompanied children have sought refuge in Europe over the last five years. Seven hundred of them perished at sea. These statistics are just so unspeakably appalling that I think we block out the full horror of them, unable or unwilling to comprehend. While I cuddle up to my children in bed at night, other people’s children are on their own in the dark, frightened, in a boat bobbing about on the Med. Some of them die that way. It’s hard to think about it for long. But we must.

Many of those who survive the trip go missing. Lost in Europe, a collective of journalists, estimate that between 2018 and 2020 over 18,000 unaccompanied refugee children have disappeared from state care in Europe. They came here, on their own, seeking a better life, escaping horrors back home. And thousands of them have now vanished from official records.

The picture painted by various NGO’s working in the field is horrendous. There are now more than 72,000 refugees and migrants stranded in Greece, Cyprus and the Balkans, including more than 22,500 children, according to Unicef. “They are unable to move forward, unwilling to go back to their home countries and struggling to fit into their host communities.” These children, they say, are increasingly showing signs of deep psychological trauma. Those who are not herded into camps, sleep in doorways or under bridges. Some are taken in by people they hardly know — to God knows what fate.

At the same time, reports continue to emerge of the callousness and brutality being used by EU member states to deter refugees from seeking a new life in Europe. The Border Violence Monitoring Network’s annual report makes for horrendous reading. Stories of the use of un-muzzled attack dogs being used on migrants. Of migrants being stripped, their clothes set on fire, then being pushed back across the border, naked. Of people being detained in freezer trucks. The report describes “forms of violence and abuse that we assert amounts to torture or inhuman treatment”.

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And the risks for those travelling to Europe by boats are worsening. Frontext — the EU’s increasingly expensive border force — has recently taken out a E100m contract with an Israeli military company for the purchase of drones to monitor migrants in European waters. Some see this as a clever way of keeping tabs on migrants without having the responsibility to save them from danger. Ships monitoring migrants have to rescue those who are at risk of drowning. Drones, conveniently, have no such ability — thus no responsibility.

Since the 2016 referendum, so much of the migration debate has been forced through the narrow weir of Brexit. And this has distorted things in at least two ways. First, it encourages Remainers not to hear a bad word about the EU, and its increasingly bad behaviour. And on the other side, it encourages the idea that leaving the EU has answered the migration issue, when it patently hasn’t. Our collective moral responsibility to these people is more properly basic than our membership, or otherwise, of some European political bloc.

Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in a crazily ambitious theatre project called The Walk. It involves a 3.5m puppet of a refugee girl, Little Amal, walking 8,000km  from the Turkish/Syrian border, over to Greece, up through Europe, and eventually ending up in Manchester. It is planned that Little Amal will land in Europe in August, on the Greek island of Chios. Where, according to The Walk website “she hears a group of women singing to her. Music that meets her across the sea…as she takes her first steps in Europe, she is invited to take part in a momentous concert created by the local orchestra.”

The reality of Chios is very different. It is a place where, earlier this month, a young Somali man died alone in his tent and was then partially consumed by rats. Dr Apostolos Veizis, executive director in Greece of the international humanitarian organisation Intersos has described it as being “like a scene out of the middle ages” He went on: “Greek island camps are synonymous with overcrowding and inhuman conditions. People are exposed on a daily basis to rats, rubbish and violence. In clinics across the islands children are often admitted with signs of rat bites. You have to wonder if treating them like this is a deliberate policy choice of the European Union so that more don’t come.”

Perhaps it sounds a little grotesque, a puppet being feted with song whilst real people are being eaten by rats. But that is precisely its point. It exposes the vast distance between how we would like to treat people, and how we actually do. And we should all be shamed by it.

So while Brexit may be done, only the dead have seen the end of Brexit books, which include Britain Alone by Philip Stephens, This Sovereign Isle by Robert Tombs and Gavin Esler’s How Britain Ends . None of them is terrible but all are sadly limited, and those limits say something interesting about Brexit and how its huge weight presses down on people who think about it too much, leaving some to buckle.

Stephens’s book is both the most accomplished and least interesting. As a long-standing columnist (and previously political editor) at the Financial Times, Stephens has extensive access to some of the key participants in Britain’s exit from the EU, and the subsequent search for an idea of what it should mean for UK foreign policy. He uses that access to good effect, painting a coherent picture of the thinking and feelings of those actors: the amateurism and arrogance of David Cameron is nicely captured, as is the bemusement of German officials who can’t quite believe that a British PM seriously believes he can charm Angela Merkel into overturning decades of German European policy for him.

Of the three books at hand, I suspect only Stephens’s will register with future historians of Brexit, because it encapsulates so neatly the views and voices of the foreign policy elites whose world was shattered by the 2016 referendum result. But for those of us alive and interested in Brexit today, the book is almost useless, since it’s all been said before. No one who regularly reads the FT or Economist will learn anything new from Stephens’s account of the FCO’s despair and European diplomats’ horror at the victory of the Brexiteers.

They certainly won’t learn anything about how that victory came about. Stephens makes no visible effort to understand the reasons the Brexiteers wanted to leave, or why 17.4 million voters backed them. Sometimes, he cannot hide his contempt. When Cameron’s somewhat accidental rejection of an EU eurozone bailout treaty in 2011 is received by Conservative MPs and voters as a triumph, this response is dismissed as “pathetic” without any attempt at analysis.  Likewise, Leavers are “elderly voters looking to reclaim the past” and the “left behind”; Remainers are “affluent and well-educated” and ensure that at least the “great cities” vote against Brexit.

A better book would wonder why, say, 1.5 million Londoners (40%) voted Leave, or why a similar proportion of voters aged 25-34 did so. But all Stephens can offer is that Boris Johnson is a good liar and Vote Leave successfully exploited voters’s grievances. Given that this book is published almost five years after the vote, during which time a lot of good research has been done into the motivations of Leavers and the Brexit campaign, it’s more than a little disappointing to see a leading political journalist show so little interest in the fundamentals of the biggest political event of his lifetime.

Here, Robert Tombs’s book beats Stephens handsomely, even though it’s half the length and based almost entirely on secondary sources. Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge, is a rare thing, a Brexit-voting academic. By his account, he was largely pushed to this position by irritation at fellow guests at Cambridge dinners and their unthinking support for EU membership. If that sounds shallow, the results are actually quite positive.

Because Tombs is not implacably committed to his “side”, he is sometimes able to catch glimpses of it in proper perspective. He notes that Leavers’s economic claims about the effects of Brexit were often as “extravagantly” overstated as those of Remain’s “Project Fear.” He doesn’t buy the narrative that the Brexit vote was some sort of grumbling revolt by a marginalised majority; he can see the many things that most Leavers and Remainers had in common, at least before the vote, and predicts, persuasively, that cultural divides between the two will not be long-lasting.

Nor does he attempt to argue that Brexit was somehow an inevitable result of Britain’s historical relationship with “Europe”, even if he does sometimes lapse into trite exceptionalism. (Apparently Britain is unique in Europe in its ties to the world beyond the continent and its bigger sense of “abroad” than others. This might surprise the former colonial trading powers such as the French, Dutch and Portuguese.)

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Such triteness is surprising from a serious scholar, but This Sovereign Isle isn’t so much scholarship as the cheery musings of a man with time and scope to read a bit about something that interests him. The breezy tone is often welcome, though. Tombs confides that he is happily married to a committed Remainer, which might explain why he makes a decent attempt to understand the motivations of Remain voters, and does not assume they acted out of bad faith or stupidity, or because they’d been lied to.

Sadly, Tombs falls off the wagon of sober analysis when it comes to the years after the referendum. With unconvincing haste, he constructs a novel interpretation of the sovereign power of the referendum result that means no one and no institution has any role in determining how Brexit should be “done”. Pretty much everyone who attempted to have a say on that question, or who argued that Parliament might express a view, is dismissed as a wicked schemer plotting to thwart the will of the people. While that might well be true of at least some of the People’s Vote crew, Tombs is reaching too far when he tries to frame the Supreme Court and Parliament as illegitimate institutions with no standing in the vast process of Brexit.

The best and worst of the three books is Esler’s. Best because it at least asks some big questions about Brexit and Britain’s future that haven’t had enough attention even among the billions of words spilled since the referendum. Worst because it shares the same lack of perspective as the other two, but adds shoddy research and a fixation on trivial ephemera.

How Britain Ends is subtitled “English Nationalism and the Rebirth of the Four Nations”. Esler’s thesis is that the Brexit vote was essentially an expression of emergent Englishness as a political force. He thinks this is a bad thing, and one that will in due course force the Scots to flee the Union, Northern Ireland to accept Irish unification and the Welsh to… actually I’m not sure, and neither is Esler, who doesn’t devote much time to the Principality.

He certainly doesn’t try to explain how his central thesis (Brexit as English thuggery) fits with a Welsh majority for Brexit. Nor does he have any words for the 1 million Scots who voted to Leave, but then 38% of that country subscribing to a project of English jingoism is hard to square with Esler’s portrait of Scotland as pro-European nation where simply everyone is horrified by the prospect of leaving.

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Well, everyone Esler talks to, anyway. Far, far too many of the assertions in this book are based on conversations Esler has had with “a friend” of one sort or another, all of whom coincidentally share his conviction that Brexit is bad, the Union is doomed and Englishness is nasty and harmful. As for those who think Englishness isn’t all bad, they’re clearly weirdos and racists. We know this because Esler remembers a row with a London taxi driver who insists that the English are an ethnically exclusive group to which foreigners cannot be admitted. I used to work on a newspaper foreign desk, and know that any decent correspondent would die of shame rather than resort to the cliché of quoting a taxi-driver in copy. Esler, once a celebrated foreign reporter, is apparently beyond such embarrassment, proudly telling us how he had the last word in his dialogue with his driver.

This isn’t even the most embarrassing moment in the book. That’s probably a pointless story of Esler visiting a bar in Washington DC and hearing US Marines singing a Bruce Springsteen song without knowing — as Esler does — what the lyrics really meant. The idiots.

That taxi journey is about as close as Esler gets to trying to understand the people and the ideas that are supposedly the centrepiece of his book. Many of his observations about Englishness and the English are cribbed from Kate Fox’s Watching the English (published in 2004) and Jeremy Paxman’s The English (1998). Still, at least those are actual books. The most maddening thing about How Britain Ends is Esler’s constant references to Twitter. Barely a page goes by without him basing some claim or observation about the fate of nations on a few characters sprayed onto a screen by someone noisy but unimportant.

This isn’t just the stylistic grumbling of an old-fashioned reviewer. Esler’s regard for tweets as a primary source of evidence shows how social media can be the ruin of good journalists and journalism. If he’d spent less time staring at Twitter and more time trying to talk to people about the Englishness to which he imputes so much, he’d have written a much better book.

There are other flaws too, some sloppy (Norman Lamont, born in Shetland and educated in Edinburgh, is not “English”) and some disingenuous. Esler claims that “an attempt was made” to have Church of England church bells ring to celebrate Brexit, something he offers as proof that the UK is run by ignorant English Leavers uncaring of propriety or the other UK nations. He doesn’t say that the “attempt” amounted to one tweet by the Brexit self-publicist Arron Banks, and as such was taken seriously by no one except #FBPE types on Twitter.

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All this is deeply frustrating, because Esler’s book is founded on some good ideas and useful inquiries. The relationship between Englishness and Britishness in a UK outside the EU really should be carefully considered, and better reflected in constitutional arrangements, as Esler suggests. He’s very good on Ireland too, and absolutely right to note the Conservative Party’s shocking indifference to the fate of Northern Ireland in the Brexit process and beyond. He’s also right to link that abandonment of Unionism to the growing lack of interest in (and understanding of) other parts of the UK among voters in each of its member-countries. Few English voters care much about keeping Northern Ireland in the UK; Scotland’s political discourse feels more and more distant from “British” debates in London.

If Stephens’s book is the only one of these three that is likely to be read in ten years’s time, Esler’s is the one that focuses most closely on the issues that will still be relevant then, and quite likely more relevant than they are now. Sadly, he too cannot achieve enough distance or perspective to offer truly useful thoughts on those issues.

The common theme of these books is that Brexit is simply too big a thing for an author today to put into that broader historical perspective. So authors who try, even very smart and accomplished authors such as these, end up falling back on their own prior convictions, using Brexit analysis as an exercise in confirmation bias. As befits a proper historian, Tombs comes closest of the three to admitting the limitations of writing the history of something that is still in motion. “Brexit is undoubtedly a gamble on the democratic nation state, its viability and its future,” he concedes. And while he thinks that gamble will pay off, he doesn’t claim total certainty. Stephens and Esler, by contrast, are more sure that Britain will slide into decline and nationalist division.

Brexit is done, but what does Brexit mean? Better to take some more time on that and get it right than rush to judgement.

Of course, the cause of these misfortunes is Covid-19, not Brexit. And thus the main event of the last few years has become a sideshow in 2020. As a result, the anti-Brexiteers have struggled to promote their narrative. However, with the Brexit negotiations coming to a head, one of their talking points is now bound to be heard — which is that, deal or no deal, we’re leaving the EU at the worst possible time. Who needs an extra set of complications when we’ve got a pandemic to deal with?

It’s a reasonable argument, but one that overlooks the counterfactual. Had the referendum gone the other way our continuing membership of the EU would have caused a different set of complications. Indeed, we’d be in a worse situation than we are now.

If Remain had won in 2016, it’s hard to say who’d be Prime Minister in 2020, but whoever the lucky person, he or she would have had a European nightmare to deal with. Not Brexit, but Britain’s involvement in the EU’s Covid rescue plan.

Consider what actually happened in Europe this year. While every country has suffered, some have suffered more than others. Those trapped by the constraints of the eurozone are in a particular bind — because they can’t devalue their currency or print money. Therefore they need help from their fellow member states.

Just what sort of help (and how much) was the subject of a high-stakes drama back in the spring and summer. Though we barely paid attention to it on this side of the Channel, it was a showdown between the “frugal four” nations (the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Sweden) and the Covid-racked countries of Southern Europe, especially Italy.

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Even before the virus, Italy was in dire straits, condemned to stagnation thanks to the eurozone. Covid turned that crisis into an emergency, so something had to be done. The Dutch and their allies, however, were not happy about having to bail out the southerners again — and certainly not in the midst of their own national emergencies. In the end, the French and Germans forced a compromise, but not before Mark Rutte — the Dutch PM — was painted as the cold-hearted villain of the piece.

Now, let’s replay these events — only this time with Britain still in the EU. The frugal four would have been a frugal five — and the chief villain would have been the British PM. Indeed, if we’d been part of these negotiations, an already bitter dispute would have become something much worse — because the Franco-German proposal would have been impossible for Britain to accept.

The actual rescue package consists of €750 billion in grants and loans. The necessary funds are to be borrowed by the European Commission from the money markets, with the liability shared among all EU member states. Thus, assuming a similar package in the no-Brexit scenario, there’d have been two poison pills for the UK.

Firstly, money: we’d be paying tens of billions towards a “recovery fund” whose ultimate purpose is to bail out the eurozone. British eurosceptics have long warned that monetary union is inherently fragile to asymmetric shocks; that’s why everyone from Gordon Brown to Nigel Farage fought so hard to keep us out of the single currency. Yet, without Brexit, there we’d be, paying to prop it up anyway.

The second poison pill is about power: allowing the Commission to borrow hundreds of billions of Euros is a massive step towards fiscal integration, and hence a fully-fledged superstate. Of course, because of Brexit, that’s the EU’s business, not ours. But what if Brexit hadn’t happened and it was our business?

Back in 2016, the Government promised us that the “UK will not be part of a further European political integration” and that no “UK powers can be transferred to the EU in the future without a referendum”. Well, giving Brussels the ability to borrow vast sums of money is about as political as it gets, involving the transfer of national powers to the EU because agreeing to underwrite someone else’s borrowing reduces how much you can borrow in your own name. Thus, had we stayed in, the promise would have been broken — a nation of reluctant Remainers betrayed.

A Conservative Prime Minister would have faced a full-scale party revolt — including Cabinet resignations and backbench defections. Therefore, he or she would have no choice but to block the deal. There’d also be overwhelming pressure from the EU to let the deal through, and as the Greeks can tell you, the masters of the eurozone will do “whatever it takes” to save the single currency. All blackmail options would have been on the table — including an end to Britain’s budgetary rebate.

In other words, an irresistible force would have met an immovable object. And whenever that happens, something breaks — most likely the British Government. In the middle of a pandemic.

Back in the real world, we need to ask whether the rescue package is enough to keep the Italians and others afloat through the brutal recovery period that lies ahead. The answer is probably not — and, in fact, the cracks are beginning to show. In the run-up to this week’s EU summit, Poland and Hungary are threatening to veto the recovery fund and the entire EU budget. Even if that’s just brinksmanship, there’s a deeper problem.

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While the recipient countries are happy to help themselves to the grant component of the fund, they’re not so keen on the loans — because these come with onerous conditions. Instead, the recipients have been borrowing the money they need on the open market, thus circumventing the conditions they object to. They’re able to do this at a low interest rate because of the European Central Bank buying up debt issued by eurozone member states. And so the weaker economies have been filling their boots, which is the sort of thing that got the eurozone into trouble before. The ECB could crack down by cutting off bond purchases. However, this could trigger the sovereign debt crisis the Bank is so desperate to avoid.

It would be easier for Brussels and Frankfurt to keep things under control if any extra money required over-and-above the €750 billion were also to be borrowed and doled out by the European Commission. There’s no immediate proposal for this to happen, but having crossed the fiscal Rubicon once already, the next trip to the money markets will be much easier — and the trip after that. I wouldn’t want to bet my house on this summer’s rescue package being a one-time deal.

Covid has taken all the old imbalances and fragilities in the eurozone and made them worse. Further bail-outs are all but inevitable. Given the new model for raising emergency funds, it’s just as well we’re no longer on the hook.

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The words “post-Brexit Britain” conjure up an unfamiliar environment fraught with danger. By voting to leave, we’ve supposedly condemned ourselves to a future full of uncertainty, while our neighbours remain secure within the European Union. But as we’ve seen, the post-Covid world means risk and uncertainty for all.

The only way that any nation can prevail in such circumstances is to stay adaptable. We must react with speed and agility to the risks that we can manage, while reducing our exposure to those that we can’t. Remaining in the EU would have compromised our freedom of action on both counts.

It is not that the EU is completely paralysed. As the recovery fund demonstrates, it is capable of changes of direction — albeit after a protracted period of wrangling. However, when the breakthrough does come it is always in the direction of further integration, of further compromises to national sovereignty. In voting to leave we did not just leave the EU as it was in 2016, but also the EU as it is now becoming.

As a result, we still have the opportunity to make the wise and timely decisions on which our future depends. Of course, that does not mean that we will — because that requires a competent, visionary government.

But at least we will be responsible for our own failings, instead of being made responsible for those of others.

Why have we become so obsessed with snobbery — or the snobbery of other people, at least? You might think: has it not ever been thus? “Snobbery is the religion of England,” wrote Frank Harris in the 1920s. And it was Orwell who claimed that nobody was as snobbish as the English.

But it’s worth remembering that in the 1960s, with the celebration of youth and the new classlessness, snobbery seemed old-fashioned and foolish. It was seen as the social vice of suburban social climbers and downwardly mobile toffs. Snobbery was doomed because it had no place in a modern, meritocratic Britain — or so its critics assumed.

We would laugh at snobbery and the Great British Snobs of TV sit-coms such as Hyancith Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life and Cyril Blamire in Last of the Summer Wine. But now snobbery is no laughing matter.

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It has even undergone a kind of conceptual make-over. For social scientists and public intellectuals, snobbery as a concept once lacked substance — at least when it came to the analysis of serious issues like class conflict or capitalism. But since Brexit and the victory of Trump, snobbery — along with elitism — dominates much of our serious political and cultural analysis both in the UK and the USA.  For many it’s a way of understanding the world and what’s gone wrong with it.

For the Right, snobbery plays the same role as racism does for the woke Left: an ugly social evil that must be exposed and expunged from society. And in the same way that the woke-Left sees institutional racism everywhere, so the Right sees institutional snobbery everywhere too — in the BBC, The Guardian, academia and the arts.

Anti-racists believe that along with explicit racism there’s a hidden implicit racism at work: a whole substratum of assumptions and codes that needs to be teased out to reveal the truth of what white people are really saying. For anti-snobbists too, snobbery exists in a series of codes and assumptions. They hear the dog-whistles of snobbery everywhere.

You may think that you don’t like reality TV because it’s mindless rubbish, but anti-snobbists claim the real reason is that you don’t like the spectacle of working-class people — and you don’t like the sort of people who watch reality TV, either! And so you’re a double snob!

And you may think that a holiday in France, a night at the opera or drinking wine from Tuscany are just the innocent pleasures of life: wrong! According to a New Statesman columnist, these are the “culture tokens” by which the snobbish middle-class, “state and restate their presumed superiority over the common masses”.

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In snob-sensitive Britain, not only do you have to be careful about appearing to criticise other people’s taste, but declaring your own. The writer Candia McWilliam was once labelled a “super-snob” for saying she loved ”reading Villiers de L’Isle Adam while eating a pomelo”. OK, it’s a touch pretentious, but snobbish? I don’t think so.

If all this talk of snobbery were just so much social-media banter without any wider consequences it wouldn’t matter. But in the same way that racism or transphobia can cost you your job, so can snobbery, as the MP Andrew Mitchell discovered in 2012 when he was alleged to have called a policeman “a fucking pleb”. Two years later Labour’s Emily Thornberry, then the Shadow Attorney General, tweeted a photo of a house in her constituency in Kent with three flags of St. George and a white van in the front of it. Whatever her intentions were — her tweet carried no comment — the mere whiff of snobbery cost Thornberry her job too.

Politicians and public-figures now show off their man-of-the-people credentials by displaying their love of football, pop music or the latest Netflix series everyone is watching. If you’re an old Etonian in public life with a passion for the works of Seneca, best keep it to yourself. And that’s exactly what the Latin-loving Boris Johnson has done ever since his Brexit rebranding as a man of the people. During the run-up to his 2019 victory Johnson was asked how he liked to relax and told his talkRADIO audience he likes to make “models of buses” and “paint passengers.” Clearly his days of quoting Virgil and wearing a toga are over.

Snobbery in our post-Brexit era has become something more associated with the liberal-Left than the conservative Right. It wasn’t always so. Snobbery used to be most visible among the Right — unapologetic snobs included Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Anthony Powell and the Oxford don A.L. Rowse.

That is not to say that the Left was never snobbish. But as the self-appointed champions of the working-class they saved their snobbish comments for the middle-class, or the “bourgeoisie” as they were contemptuously called. Looking down on Suburban Man, his subservient Stepford-Wife and 2.4 kids — with his ghastly taste in decor, his middlebrow music and books — was perfectly acceptable and even admired, as the success of Mike Leigh’s 1977 BBC television drama Abigail’s Party showed.

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In those days though, that was called social satire. Snobbery is when you laugh at the working-class; satire is laughing at the middle-class. And we’re still mocking and laughing at the middle-class, only we’re too worried about snobbery towards the working-class to notice or care. Owen Jones in his book Chavs (2011) claimed that prejudice towards the working-class was the only socially acceptable form of prejudice; now when it comes to snobbery it’s the only form of prejudice that causes concern.

I accept that no one is going to take a stand against being snobby about us poor maligned middle-class folks with our much-mocked “first-world problems” and our curated coffee fixations. I get it. But if anti-snobbists really believe that snobbery is wrong — and they do — then why not?

Britain really became snob-sensitive in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016. Many commentators claimed that a new wave of snobbery had been unleashed by Remainers. And that’s partly true. Too often I have heard my Remainer friends bemoan those “ghastly” Brexiteers. That said, over 16 million people voted to remain in the EU — they can’t all be snobs, can they?

We all agree that snobbery is wrong. The question is: how wrong? How terrible a social problem is it? Considering the fury it provokes, you’d think snobbery were on par with racism, anti-Semitism or sexism. And for the anti-snob, it is. Bryan Appleyard in the Spectator magazine argues that “snobbery is exactly like racism” and that while it may be occasionally funny, snobbery is always, writes Appleyard, “evil”.   

Is it really evil or something merely offensive?  It’s true that like racism or anti-Semitism, snobbery is rooted in prejudice. But there is a prejudice that causes real harm — physical injury and emotional damage — and prejudice that is shallow and does no real serious and lasting damage.

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Whatever happened to TV's working-class heroes?

By Fiona Sturges

We make a big fuss about snobbery but I suspect that its actual presence on people’s daily lives is minimal. You don’t find YouTube videos of passengers on public transport being subjected to vicious tirades about their cheap Primark clothes, vulgar jewellery or their dropped ‘h’s by a drunken snob, clutching a vintage bottle of Chateau Du Ponce.

And what of the serious damage caused by snobbery? Are mosques fire bombed and Jews attacked on the street because of snobbery? (The snob raises their nose, not their fists.) Does snobbery create poor health, homelessness, family breakdown, mental illness, suicide or drug addiction the way poverty can? I don’t think so. Does anyone really believe that if snobbery totally disappeared that it would make a substantial difference to the quality of everyday life of ordinary people?

Anti-snobbists complain when the working-class are shamed on social media — but do they really feel ashamed? Maybe it’s — dare I say it — a bit snobbish to assume that working-class people are so fragile they’d be hurt by some ephemeral tweet from some snobbish twat?

The Right is always complaining that people — particularly the young — lack any kind of resilience or fortitude when faced with words or ideas that make them uncomfortable or hurt their feelings. Such people are usually dismissed as “snowflakes” — unless they are working-class people who allegedly have been a victim of middle-class liberal snobbery.

The idea that working-class people across the land are sitting at home and in pubs seething with indignation at the snobbery of middle-class people at north London dinner parties is absurd. Of course if you ask such people they will criticise the more blatant forms of snobbery. But most of the time, I suspect, they don’t even think about these matters. Why should they care what such people think?

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Don't call it poverty porn

By Jenny mccartney

And there’s some academic evidence that they don’t. In Reacting to Reality Television the sociologists Bev Skeggs and Helen Wood examined the hostile and often snobbish attitudes towards working-class women who appeared in reality TV shows. These women were criticised for being too fat, for drinking too much, smoking too much and having too many children — all the clichés about “chavs” rolled into one.

But how did these women react to such snobbish attacks? Were they angry or hurt? Did they feel ashamed? No, they responded with admirable indifference. Professor Skeggs said on a BBC Radio 4 programme on snobbery, that these women who had been subjected to such abuse didn’t “care about a lot of these middle-class judgments being imposed on them. They just didn’t notice it.”

By defending the white working-class from middle-class snobbery it allows one to appear a true egalitarian — without having to believe in equality. It’s curious that people are so angry about snobbery, but not the inequities of class or the inequalities of capitalism that snobbery is based on.

If anyone is to be pitied it’s not the working-class person who is looked down upon, but the snob doing the looking. Believing in your own superiority — because of your birth or consumer choices — means that you are in the grips of a terrible and dangerous form of self-delusion. The snob is trapped in a self-fulfilling fallacy. Like the man who thinks he’s Napoleon or Jesus Christ, the snob needs our help to get back to reality, rather than our condemnation.

Our leaving is the result of a collective decision, taken by a majority of its people, about the destiny of their national community — or what most consider to be their home. And this decision, contrary to the liberal view of citizens as autonomous individuals who are mainly driven by self-interest, was never rooted in transactional considerations about money.

Nor was it focused on individuals. Rather, it was anchored in a collective and sincere concern about the wider group, about the nation, and in profound questions about identity, culture and tradition. Who are we? What kind of nation are we? What holds us together? Where do we want to go, together, in the future?

Remainers never grasped the potency of these questions — or how to answer them in terms that the majority would recognise. At times, they presented a vision of Britain that was fundamentally at odds with how most people see it — a random collection of individuals who have little in common aside from the pursuit of economic growth and “openness”.

And even now, more than three years on, many commentators and campaigners continue to display a poor understanding that only underlines their remoteness from their fellow citizens. Myths about Leavers have flourished.

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Populism in Italy is far from defeated

By Matthew Goodwin

Perhaps the most popular claim is that Leavers did not know what they were doing. Yet a rapidly growing pile of research suggests the exact opposite. Leavers knew exactly what they were doing. They were asking for two entirely reasonable and legitimate things: for decisions that affect their country to be taken in their country, and for their government to have greater control over who comes in and out of the country.

These requests, in turn, were rooted in things that have long lain at the core of what it means to be British: respect for judicial independence and the common law; a strong emphasis on the need for political accountability; a rich, proud and uninterrupted tradition of parliamentary democracy; an instinctive suspicion of the centralisation of power; a vibrant civic culture; a strong attachment to both little and national platoons.

So the popular portrayal of Brexit as an irrational backlash against “the system” — as a “protest vote” — never made sense. Researchers have since demonstrated that wanting to register a protest against “the establishment” was at best only a distant concern for most Leavers; voting to exit signalled more a desire to return to a traditional political settlement. The idea of their home being governed by people whose attachments appeared to lie elsewhere — in distant and insufficiently democratic institutions — seemed alien to the very things Leavers associate with the nation.

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Why Remainers are the imperialist nostalgics

By Mary Harrington

Contrary to this myth of incoherent Leavers — which stems from a tradition of ‘elitist’ democratic thought that has long been sceptical of the masses — those who put their cross next to Leave shared a clear and coherent outlook.

They wanted to regain their national independence and reassert their national sovereignty against supranational institutions that looked neither transparent nor particularly responsive. They wanted to be able to control the pace and scale of demographic change. And they felt that, on balance, the EU threatened not just the stability of Britain’s economy but, more fundamentally, its national identity, culture and security.

In an era in which perceptions of competence have come to play a far more important role in politics, Remainers asked Leavers to put their faith in a project that had largely failed to respond to a succession of major crises, that had shown little solidarity to fellow member states and which, at the time of the vote, even seemed to be struggling to guarantee the security of its citizens.

In the shadow of the result, prominent Remainers set out to find the Wizard of Oz: shadowy networks, social media platforms and evil genius campaigners, anything that could be used to justify their claim that the result was somehow illegitimate. But along the way they lost sight of the real and legitimate reasons that people had to vote Leave.

Brexit turned winners into losers and losers into winners. And by doing so it threw light on a settlement that had simply stopped working for a large swathe of the British population.

We now know that many, though not all, of the people who were most likely to back Brexit lived in communities that had been suffering from “long-term economic distress”; areas that had, to all intents and purposes, been cut adrift. Places where the state had retreated and citizens had been left, on their own, to grapple with disproportionately high rates of unemployment, poor health, low quality schools, inequality and sharp declines in wages. Remain asked people who had been priced out of their local housing markets, and who had been the most heavily exposed to economic shocks from globalisation, to walk to their local polling station and vote to stay in this dreary existence.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

Another misleading claim is that these were people who simply did not understand the wonders of diversity because they had never experienced it. Yet we now know that support for Leave was significantly higher in communities that had not only seen their economies decay, but which had also experienced a sharp increase in demographic change in a very short period of time. Once again, they were on the front line of globalisation, as local economies and cultures were further disrupted, while opposition or merely voicing disquiet was met with accusations of racism.

Leavers were not stupid. They could see that the failure of their elected representatives to control immigration was not simply because of a widening gap in the values of the rulers and the ruled. There was a deeper and more troubling realisation. Their leaders no longer could control who was coming in and out.

Few if any Remainers offered a meaningful or credible reply to this reality while a not insignificant number of them simply looked indifferent to the plight of their fellow citizens. Many regurgitated the trope that Britain could have dealt with these problems while staying in the EU, expecting people who had watched their towns and neighbourhoods decline over many decades to believe them, and to not ask why nothing had been done when Britain was a fully-fledged, signed-up member.

Countless other myths have emerged. Leavers, we are still told, want “to return to the 1950s”. But new work finds that they are not the only ones driven by nostalgia. While they certainly prefer an earlier era where there was less immigration, less technology and respect for traditional families, Leavers favour returning to an era when there was more economic equality and more working-class MPs. The claim that one tribe looks back while the other looks forward is just as misleading as the claim that one is ‘open’ while the other is ‘closed’.

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How multiculturalism divides us

By Paul Embery

Nor do some of the other claims hold up. The idea that Leavers are stupid and do not understand how the EU works does not sit easily with research which found that, when it comes to knowledge about the EU, there was “no average difference between Leave voters and Remain voters”.

Accounts that argue the media somehow advantaged Leave overlook research which find no significant skew in either direction. And accounts that present Leavers as longing for a world where “faces were white” are undermined by the fact that one-in-three of Britain’s black and ethnic minority voters backed Brexit, while ethnic minority MPs were just as likely as white MPs to do the same.

Looking back now, few journalists ever ventured into the large, urban and diverse areas like Birmingham, Slough and Watford that provided majority support to Leave. Had they done so then they would have found what researchers later documented: that many ethnic minority Leavers share the exact same grievances as their white counterparts. They felt that Britain was controlled by the EU, they worried about the EU overriding UK law, they felt anxious about immigration and believed that minority rights are better protected in Britain than in EU member states.

This reality was also avoided because it undermined seductive narratives about an intolerant ‘white-lash’, which in turn fed a deeper need among Remainers to retain a feeling of moral superiority. Yet even that suggestion — that Remain represented the last beacon of tolerance and decency — sits awkwardly with work conducted since the referendum which suggests that it is Labour and Liberal Democrat voters who would be more likely to end their friendships with populist voters than vice versa, and that Remainers would be more likely to feel bothered if a close relative married a Leaver than vice versa.

Indeed, my own work suggests that Leavers are consistently less likely than Remainers to distance themselves from the idea of having members of the other Brexit tribe as their co-workers, neighbours, friends or children-in-law.

As the academic Noah Carl points out, few people seem to be talking about it, but ever since the shocks of 2016 there has emerged a growing pile of evidence to suggest that liberals appear significantly more likely than conservatives to block or unfriend people who hold beliefs they disagree with.

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Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

None of this will stop the cultivation of further myths of course. Brexit, we are now told, is unleashing a wave of racism, even forcing members of the Royal Family to flee abroad. Yet prejudice in Britain continues to decline. And, since voting for Brexit, the British people have, overall, become less concerned about immigration, more positive about its effects and are often more upbeat than their counterparts in the EU.

If anything, it appears from one study that regaining control over the potent issue of immigration has been key to this softening of attitudes. Brexit has made our politics more not less tolerant, yet many on the liberal-Left continue to catastrophise, painting a picture of a country that their fellow citizens simply do not recognise.

History, it was once said, is a nation’s collective memory. And history is written by those who win the great struggles of the day. Yet with Brexit we might find something different. Most of the spheres of influence continue to be dominated by those who disapprove of the Brexit decision — the universities, media, the arts and high culture. In this sense, we might yet find that while Leavers won the battle, Remainers could end up writing the history. And if this is true then perhaps the myths of Brexit are only just getting started.

Stage one was shock. I didn’t stay up for the count. I went comfortable to bed believing my side would prevail. I woke at 3 and checked the news. I didn’t sleep again: the shock wasn’t about the practicalities or about the policy. It was that I didn’t know my country. Was this my beloved home, suddenly now so unfamiliar?

I couldn’t knuckle down to proper work so I trundled off to Ikea to buy furniture for the new office my charity was moving into. Because what more European place is there than Ikea? They even have the right brand colours: blue and yellow. Just as in Harry Potter the cure for a brush with the dementors is chocolate, so the cure for a brush with the Brexiteers is surely a Swedish meatball.

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Accept it Remainers, you've lost

By Douglas Murray

Stage two: denial. I spent a couple of months expecting that we would leave but not really leave. So many leavers had said we’d stay aligned, we’d stay close, we’d still have perfect access to the single market and frictionless trade. I believed them. We could just duck out of the institutions of the EU but play along as if little had changed. Boris Johnson himself helped sustain this fantasy — his first article in the Telegraph after the referendum spelled out a vision of our future as the closest of buddies with our erstwhile partners.

Stage three: anger. All that came to a juddering halt when Theresa May gave her Lancaster House speech, full of red lines, incompatible promises and economic incoherence. I raged about David Davis turning up in Brussels without any papers. I was furious with Liam Fox for his pointless job as Secretary of State for Trade-Deals-We-Aren’t-Legally-Allowed-To-Sign-Yet. I drafted and deleted endless bitter tweets at pundits who thought it would be easy to run a Midlands car factory without just-in-time access to goods, simply because they could ski across the Swiss border on holiday.

Stage four: bargaining. This is when the false hope started to dawn. In the psychological literature, bargaining is the stage where you obsess about what you could have done differently — and try to strike a deal with God (or the universe): “I’ll be different, I’ll pray every day, I’ll be kind to my sister. Just make it go away.”

In Brexitland, bargaining was when we devised a thousand strategies to trip us into another referendum, another election, another chance to roll the dice again and get a different answer. I wasn’t part of those campaigns but I dared to hope. “If we stop Brexit it will be because of them, and their intransigence,” I told myself, almost ashamed that I hadn’t stood with them — that I was the sort of capitulator who assumed that a referendum, when lost, was lost.

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Have Remainers lost perspective?

By Matthew Goodwin

Stage five: depression. This started to creep up my spine during December’s general election. The debate was shifting away. The activists in their blue and yellow robes still thought we could stop Brexit but the voters didn’t. They wanted it over, even though few thought it would do any good. Boris Johnson offered relief from the trauma, the opportunity to end it all.

Depression’s power is immense. It brings with it a desperate yearning for sleep, for peace, for finality. As Edward Thomas, one of the most depressed poets England has ever produced, put it: “There is not any book, or face of dearest look, that I would not turn from now, to go into the unknown.” So in our depressive state, unable to summon the energy to fight any more, we allowed the end to come.

Stage six: testing. We asked ourselves: might it be ok? Might it be alright in Northern Ireland? It’s just a little more paperwork. Can the Union with Scotland hold? Will this new government adopt a liberal immigration policy, and an active industrial strategy to alleviate the damage of our departure? Will the new Conservative seats in the North give the party impetus to govern differently? Would it be better for all of us if we found a way to get along? Were we ready to forgive?

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Everything you know about Europe is wrong

By Ed West

Stage seven: acceptance. To end the grieving process, acceptance has to be unconditional. It isn’t whether Brexit is better, or worse, or better than it could have been. It simply is. An unchangeable, immutable fact.

The prayer used at Alcoholics Anonymous is well known: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Well, I have lived in politics for nearly twenty years. Politics is about training yourself to file almost everything in the “things I can change” box. It’s about never settling for a world less perfect than you can imagine. So accepting this loss is hard. It goes against my soul. I loved my place as a European citizen. I loved the freedom. I loved the belonging. I loved the solidarity. All this is lost to me and to my friends, and my countrymen. But worst of all, this is a thing I cannot change.

Some people will laugh at this article. How could I possibly equate the process of leaving a multilateral organisation as equivalent to losing a loved one? Laugh away, if you like. When I spoke about my sadness a couple of years ago, on Newsnight, the Express wrote that I had “sparked anger” by doing so. Someone emailed to tell me that my “liberal tears” tasted sweet.

I know it is not easy to be gracious in victory. You have put your all into fighting, and you deserve a moment of glory, and celebration. But the others fought too. Their tears are not sweet. They are as bitter as yours would have been. Don’t demand grace from the losers, the ones with nothing to show for all their work, ambition and hope. Their hands are empty; yours are full. So show compassion.

To all those who raise a glass as Britain leaves the European Union: you have your Brexit. Leave us our grief. It’s the least you can do.

Yet Labour won just 47% of the Remain vote, while the Conservatives captured 73% of Leavers. The Tories retained two-thirds of their 2017 Remain voters while Labour kept only half their Leavers. This is the story of the 2019 election, and it speaks to Labour’s deep misalignment with the cultural mood of the country.

And a deep dive into British public opinion shows that Labour Remainers, the group which dominates among party activists, sit well to the Left of LibDem Remainers on economics and are far too Left-liberal on culture for Tory Remainers and ex-Labour Leavers. This means the party either has to shift to the Blairite Right on the economy or tack in a conservative direction to woo Labour Leavers — much like the Danish Social Democrats.

To understand why, let’s focus on the relatively understudied Remainers, who tend to be typecast as one-dimensional metropolitan liberals. Yet Remainers are not all liberals. In fact, Tory Remainers are more similar to Labour Leavers on cultural issues than Remainers who voted Labour or Lib Dem.

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Who cares about immigration?

By Eric Kaufmann

Using 2017 data (which won’t differ much from today), Figure 1 shows that when it comes to beliefs about black, gay and female equality, Tory Remainers are closer to Tory Leavers than Labour Remainers.

 Scale runs from 1 — not far enough — to 5 — gone too far

Figure 2 shows a similar story on immigration attitudes, with Tory Remainers twice as restrictionist as Labour Remainers (based on 2019 attitudes and 2017 vote). In a survey I conducted with Simon Hix and Thomas Leeper of the London School of Economics in 2017, we found that the average Tory Remainer was willing to admit 61,000 people from the EU per year compared with 78,000 for Labour Remainers. For Asian, African and Middle Eastern immigration, the numbers were just 47,000 for Tory Remainers versus 65,000 for Labour Remainers.

We find something similar on both English and British national identity in the 2017 British Election Study, with Tory Remainers considerably closer to the nationalistic Labour Leavers than the more cosmopolitan Labour Remainers. There is also an important difference between Tory and Labour Remainers in their affection toward the European institutions, as figure 3 reveals. In other words, for Conservative Remainers, a Remain vote was a pragmatic rather than expressive choice.

In effect, there are three groups of Remainers: conservative, liberal and Left. Whereas working-class Leavers are cross-pressured by economic factors, inclining some toward Labour, many Remainers are cross-pressured by both economic and social conservatism toward the Tories. This gives the Conservatives an advantage, which showed up in their 2019 result, where they won two-thirds of 2017 Tory Remainers.

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By Tom Chivers

A good barometer of how well each party is doing against its pool of ideologically-aligned voters is to examine the share of the progressive vote won by Labour and compare it with the proportion of the Right-wing vote won by the Tories. Whereas the Tories consolidated the vast majority of Right votes, losing little to the Brexit Party, Labour bled a considerable share of progressive voters to the Lib Dems and Greens, often in battleground constituencies.

Figure 4 shows that in Leave seats (at top left of chart), Labour won most of the progressive vote. The problem is that Leave seats are slanted against Labour, making them difficult to win. In more Remain constituencies, the vote was bifurcated into a Left-Remain and liberal-Remain zones, dissipating Labour’s advantage.

Figure 4.

Essentially, Labour needs to appeal to voters in two or three of the zones. The comfort zone of the party is zone 1, populated by culturally and economically Left voters, concentrated in inner cities and university towns, with their young, highly-educated and ethnically diverse populations. I call this “Left Remania” in figure 5.

Figure 5.

In order to expand, the party first must make inroads into zone 3, Liberal Remania. This is depicted in figure 6: a Remain-voting region where the Labour share of the progressive vote is below 50%. On the British Election Study, 2015, Lib Dem voters were a full scale point to the right on economic redistribution from Labour voters. Labour averaged 2 out of 10, the Lib Dems 3 and Tories 4.5. Thus moving into zone 3 will require a softening of Corbyn-McDonell economic redistributionism and a corresponding effort to instil greater confidence in Labour’s stewardship of the economy. While this wouldn’t get Labour all the way to 325, it would be an important start.

Figure 6.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

In order to move closer to 325, Labour also has to moderate on culture, stepping back from overreach on questions of immigration and the race-gender-sexuality agenda. They must find a way to either recapture the culturally-conservative working-class Leavers in figure 7 or appeal to successful suburban and provincial Tory Remainers in figure 8.

Figure 7.

Both present formidable obstacles. Working-class Leavers are further from Labour culturally, but, as we saw, Tory Remainers are both economically and culturally estranged from the median Labour Remainer.

Figure 8.

The notion that Labour can remain wedded to its Momentum agenda, combining a far-left economic and cultural progressivism, and simultaneously win a majority, is a pipe dream. Assuming Labour sticks to its economic programme due to its allergy to Blairism, it will need to take on its cultural radicals and rediscover national protection. As I note elsewhere, this is not going to change after Brexit. Post-Brexit, issues such as immigration, national identity and identity politics will, if anything, gain in salience.

Labour is on the wrong side of where it needs to be to win crucial voting blocs outside its comfort zone. In order to succeed, it must become more like the Danish Social Democrats, engaging in a cultural revolution akin to the economic one Tony Blair pioneered in the mid-90s.

Since its founding, the EU has self-mythologised as a project of peace, whose principal aim is to prevent a repeat of the two World Wars of 1914 and 1939. The basis for this argument tends to be a notion that the World Wars were caused by an excess of “nationalism”, with the aggressive and expansive German identity promoted by the Nazis held up as the primary exhibit, and that by diluting the power of Europe’s nation states nationalism will also be attenuated.

Lately, despite its convoluted and multivariate origins, the First World War has also been recruited by European leaders as a cautionary tale against nationalism. But the origin of the Second World War can just as reasonably be described as a multi-sided jockeying for power between imperial powers.

And as Yoram Hazony has argued in The Virtue of Nationalism, Hitler was less a nationalist than an imperialist, who sought to expand German-controlled territory and as such was resisted by the rival empires of Britain, the United States and other allies. That is to say, the two World Wars were arguably more driven by the competing interests of imperial players than an excess of national identification as such.

Over the horrific bloodshed that took place between 1914 and 1945, these imperial powers lost or began the irreversible process of losing their empires. The British Empire was at its greatest, not to mention most crisis-ridden, after the end of the First World War, and by the end of the Second was exhausted to the point where it no longer had either the will or the resources to sustain its imperial reach. 

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Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By Mary Harrington

The international world order that replaced the Old World empires from 1945 until relatively recently was, in effect, an empire of American-influenced rules underpinned by American military and economic dominance. And in this new age of Pax Americana, international conventions established the right of nations to self-determination. It was no longer the done thing to invade countries halfway round the world for the purpose of grabbing resources, extending geopolitical influence and/or “civilising” the natives.

With no one overseas to colonise, what happened to the old ruling bureaucracies of the formerly imperial nations of Europe? What now for those educated with imperial dreams and a global vision, trained from a young age to run international business and political institutions, dreaming of rule across vast territories and hundreds of millions of benighted souls in need of guidance?

The solution they came up with was to colonise one another. To console themselves for the loss of the riches and ready supply of servants in their overseas colonies, the washed-up post-imperial nations of Europe agreed to pool their reach, influence and unwashed natives into a kind of ersatz empire.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

It did not greatly matter whether the natives in question liked the idea or not, as the pooling was undertaken largely without public discussion and in practice (to begin with at least) made little difference to their everyday lives. Rather, the extension of ‘reach’ and ‘influence’ was largely a bureaucratic one, harmonising rules on the kind of trade and manufacturing standards which most ordinary people care very little about.

The result provided an imperial buzz for a cadre of civil servants, who got to dictate standards on the minutiae of countless areas of commerce for hundreds of millions of people rather than mere tens (and enjoy the perks of a colossal corporate lobbying industry in the process).

Even better, they could do all this without any of the demonstrable dangers of the kind of overheated jingoism that came with the style of imperialism that ended in bloodshed with the two world wars. A kind of diet imperialism, if you like: all the fun of civilising the heathens, with none of the guilt.

Their diet empire now constituted, the post-imperial civil servants of each EU member state could enjoy something of the lavish transnational lifestyle, money-no-object pageantry and grand entertaining they missed out on by the unfortunate fact of having been born too late for a career enjoying absolute power in the colonies while feathering their own nests. Indeed, the strange disappearance of a 2014 report on corruption within EU institutions suggests the diet imperialism of Europe offers ample opportunities of the nest-feathering variety.

Those in the administrative class who missed out on the opportunities for self-enrichment in the prewar empires can enjoy instead the huge and relatively unaccountable sums of money that flow around the European Union’s various budgets.

Indeed, even when misbehaviour tips over into outright criminal activity it can sometimes go unpunished, as was the case with IMF head Christine Lagarde, who received a criminal conviction in 2016 for negligence over inappropriate payouts while in the French Government but was nonetheless installed this year as head of the European Central Bank.

The administrative empire also delivers a servant class, at a scale appropriate to the post-imperial nostalgia it serves to alleviate. The debate around the Brexit referendum was full of dire warnings about the looming loss of staff to (among other things) wipe bottoms, look after children, pick fruit and make lattes.

These laments strongly hint at the preoccupations of a colonial class reluctant in the extreme to let go of a rich supply of subaltern masses whose services were rendered affordable by the expansion of the labour market through freedom of movement.

It is not just the servants. The prospect of losing the European extension to their shrunken, empire-less British geopolitical self-image cuts to the heart of our modern governing class. As one would expect, then, those lamenting Britain’s post-Brexit loss of “standing” or evolution into a “laughing stock” (who cares?) are not the supposedly imperialist and thin-skinned Brexiters but those who wish to remain. Because in their view the only available modern source of the suitably elevated pomp, influence and imperial “standing” to which they feel entitled is our membership of the EU.

Paradoxically, in the act of accusing Brexiters of the imperial nostalgia of which they themselves are guilty, the Remain Europhiles have hit on a term which is more accurate than they realise for their Brexiter foes: Little Englanders. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the original Little Englanders were anti-imperialist, and wanted the borders of the United Kingdom to stop at the edges of the British Isles.

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By Claire Fox

The epithet tends to be used against Brexiters to imply jingoistic and probably racist imperial aspirations, but this is the opposite of what it meant when first used. And taken in its original sense, calling Brexiters Little Englanders is entirely accurate: they would like the borders of the nation to which they belong to be at the edge of the British Isles, not along the edge of Turkey or Russia.

Should they get their way, this will present the United Kingdom with the prospect of life as an independent nation of modest size. We can then look forward to a future going about our business much reduced from the giddy, extractive and racist highs of the early twentieth century but hopefully more stable, more content with ourselves and, importantly, perhaps even finally at ease with the loss of British imperial reach.

For the imperialist nostalgists of Remain, though, unable to reconcile themselves to the notion of the United Kingdom as anything but a world power, this possibility is anathema. The argument tends to be that unless we join a large power bloc we will be ground to dust between them. Gideon Rachman argued recently in the FT  that “the EU needs to become a power project”, saying that future geopolitics will be a contest between four or five large blocs including China and the US and the individual nations of Europe cannot hold a candle to these behemoths.

But must this necessarily be so? Rachman’s future is just a projection, and many projections – such as Fukuyama’s famous one about the “end of history” — have been proved wrong by subsequent events. Admittedly, a multipolar future seems likely. But any age of competing superpowers has always also contained smaller nations that managed to avoid absorption into a larger empire by one means or another. Why should Little England not be one of them?

The only thing holding us back from a post-Brexit and doubly post-imperial future, at ease with our reduction in stature and ready for a new chapter in our national history, is the imperial nostalgia of the Europhiles.

The Liberal Democrats took the seat from the Conservatives after sitting MP Chris Davies was convicted of expenses fraud. They overturned a majority of about 8,000, with new MP Jane Dodds securing about 1,400 more votes than Davies, who decided to stand again. Labour did badly, barely holding their deposit. The Brexit Party took 10% of the vote.

These are the facts.

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How the Left lost Wales

By James Bloodworth

They are, variously, proof of the following:

1. The Brexit Party is successfully putting pressure on Boris Johnson, denying him wiggle room and helping guarantee we leave on October 31.

2. The Brexit Party is making it harder for Boris Johnson to get us out of the EU, by replacing a Brexiteer MP with an ardent Remainer.

3. The Conservative vote held up well considering the MP had been convicted of expenses fraud.

4. The Conservatives only squeezed the Brexit Party down to 10% because the sitting MP was so popular locally.

5. The Liberal Democrats are the strongest Remain party and as head of a Remain alliance can become the new main party of opposition.

6. Remain parties got substantially fewer votes than Leave parties, so being the “party of Remain” is never going to work for the Lib Dems.

7. Labour’s collapsing in Wales.

8. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to remain.

9. Labour needs to adopt a clear policy to leave.

10. Labour needs to ditch Jeremy Corbyn.

The only topic on which there appears to be consensus is that Brecon and Radnorshire is a particularly beautiful part of the country, even if some of its towns and villages remain entirely unpronounceable to the travelling activists who turned up over the last months. The best moment of the night was when the High Sheriff of Powys decided to read out the results exclusively in Welsh, leaving the scores of English speakers in a state of pale-faced panic about who had really won.

But among all this arguing, there’s a lot of clarity. Liberal Democrats are joyful and optimistic. They know what to do next: double down as the party of Remain, stake their claim as the leader of the Remain alliance, and try to get other parties and other MPs to join them. Full steam ahead.

Suggested reading

How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

The Conservatives have plenty to console themselves with. I don’t think their strategy was up for debate, but even if it were, the result gives them a clear rationale for pursuing it. Squeeze the Brexit vote, put the Leave coalition back together, and let the Remainers and the moderates go. Full steam ahead.

The only party that deserves to be confused this morning is Labour. Labour used to own Wales: they have topped the poll in seats and votes in every general election in my lifetime, and beyond it. Perhaps Brecon and Radnorshire isn’t a particular stronghold for the party, but to clock in only 5.3% of the vote is truly abysmal.

Brexit is the defining issue of the decade, and it is a binary one. In or out. Leave or Remain. The two camps are getting more and more entrenched in their positions, and Labour’s attempt to straddle both is killing them. They have managed to contort themselves in a way that makes almost everyone who cares about Brexit angry, hoping perhaps that Brexit would no longer be a big deal by the time of the General Election.

But Brecon and Radnorshire makes it harder than ever to avoid a General Election this autumn, before Brexit has happened. In a Brexit election, I struggle to see how Labour avoids tearing itself apart. Too Leave-ish for the Remainers, and too Remain-ish for the Leavers. In politics, you have to take a side. Labour needs to make its choice, before it is too late.