One of the many misleading slogans repeated by the Brexiteers is that the UK is ‘leaving the European Union but not leaving Europe’. This is true in a geographical sense but occludes the prospect of the radical breaking of a whole set of practical and ideational ties with the rest of Europe. It should be remembered that Theresa May’s initial animus, while she was Home Secretary, was against the European Human Rights regime rather than the EU, and a shadow hangs over the UK’s adherence to this and other institutions which it helped to create in the post-war years. The claim is made that the UK could sustain a respectable human rights regime without reference to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), just as it could run an economy with EU standards of product safety, consumer protection and so on without reference to the EU, but there is a similar failure to recognise the difference between collectively agreed and administered arrangements/understandings and those which, like Stalinist parliaments, merely simulated them.

The most chilling scenario was one in which the UK used its freedom to create an offshore economy with unilateral free trade and a reliance primarily on financial services. If this scenario seems unrealistic, it is worth remembering that it was used as a threat in the event of the UK’s failure to reach an agreement with the EU by Philip Hammond – the economics minister in May’s cabinet – usually seen as one of the saner members of the UK government. With wages plummeting, agriculture ceasing to exist on the territory of the UK and massive unemployment, the surplus population would have to be managed by increasingly authoritarian means, perhaps dressed up as a British version of national socialism. Something like this scenario still seems to be on the agenda of the illegally funded Conservative ‘Europe Research Group’. It is of course possible to conceive a cosier Brexit scenario of egalitarianism, superlative welfare provision and social tolerance, of the kind that would appeal to Jeremy Corbyn and perhaps to a majority of the electorate. There is however no prospect of this being economically viable in a UK/England isolated from the global economy. The UK missed its chance of becoming something like Norway in the later 20th century when North Sea oil opened a window of opportunity. It opted instead for Thatcherism.