“I’m now even more convinced that if we don’t find a democratic way to close the fissures in our society, this country will be torn apart.
Of all the fissures, it is class that requires the most urgent attention. Remain tried to offer the status quo to millions of people for whom the status quo hasn’t been working for decades. The response to the result has served only to underline the problem. The barrage of hatred and intolerance unleashed by sections of the remain vote against the working class has been horrifying. I’ve seen this personally in the tweets and emails I’ve had to delete in the past few days.
What is particularly galling is that many of those who have vented their fury on the poor and marginalised profess sympathy for them in other circumstances. As the Guardian columnist Paul Mason told a remain audience at an event last week that if they were feeling angry and disaffected after the referendum, they now had an inkling of what it feels like to be working class.
Now, after the shock of the result, those who don’t want to live in a bitterly divided society need to think urgently about how it can be changed. Some people, of course, have been doing this for years.
In 2014 the Tory MP Rory Stewart made a startling claim in a Guardian interview: “We pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” He went on to suggest that politicians, journalists and bankers know they don’t have any power but think that others do.
If he’s right, the referendum was less “a nation decides” and more a runaway train crashing into the buffers at high speed. Stewart’s solution was a radical localism. It’s more of that kind of thinking we need now.”
How my heart sings 