A week on from the referendum that was going to take back democracy from the elites, and we still don’t know exactly who will be taking back democracy for us. But it will be one representative of the elites or another. At the moment, it looks like Michael Gove or Theresa May will be their political face. Unless someone else in the Tory party offers them a better deal between now and September.

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The elites have already been reassured that there will be public money to squander on disentangling Britain from international consensus and getting the elites the trade deals that they want.

Conservative promises to step away from the deficit obsession are about this, not ending austerity. If they are going to limit free movement, as they say they will, those already on this island will have to be desperate enough to take whatever pay they can get. Conservative MPs will spend the rest of the summer listening to what May or Gove have to propose on the matter, and what electoral bones they’ll promise to throw to the public, then deciding which two candidates for leader and prime minister they will ask their membership to choose between. The kind of Brexit Britain gets will be decided by those people. There are way more than 50 ways to leave the EU, and leave voters green-lighted all or any of them.

Further, we as yet have no idea at all what parliamentary opposition will be scrutinising this reconfigured Conservative government, or from which perspective they will be doing so. All we know is that the Labour party, its ability to win an election already sorely diminished by the political shift in Scotland, is more besotted with its internal “democracy” than it is with parliamentary democracy.

Jeremy Corbyn is a hostage to the hopes of its membership, who would rather give the Conservatives a free pass than listen to how their favoured leader’s ideas about responding to Brexit stack up against those of others in the party. Their ideological elitism cannot be wrong or damaging, because it’s “of the left”. The wealthy pull the strings and Labour members seem happy because Corbyn states this obvious fact, even as he haplessly abets it. What a mess. What a joke.

How can anyone believe that UK democracy needs more power when it makes such a mockery of the power it’s got?

This – this! – is the robust homegrown democracy that the bureaucrats of the EU are threatening. This – this! – is the wondrous model of democratic accountability that has to be fully restored to “sovereignty”. How can anyone believe that UK democracy needs more power when it makes such a mockery of the power that it’s got? Which is considerable.

A bleakly funny footnote is that the Corbynites are doing all this partly due to fury over Iraq, a debacle that our horrified EU partners were powerless to stop us embarking on. Unfortunately. That is the puny extent to which they are our overlords.

Another bleakly funny footnote is that Tony Blair achieved power by pandering to the desire for “flexibility” of big business, the unelected ringmasters that Conservatives will be bending over backwards to please, even as a fortune in public money is spent on disentangling ourselves from the EU in a way that will mollify them. The Tories have already punished the people with austerity because Labour stole their financial-free-for-all clothes, then had no choice but to pump money into the disaster that it caused.

Labour gets the blame for failing to engage in the debate about immigration. Others are to blame too. The Confederation of British Industry. The Institute of Directors. These were the unions that Blair aimed to please with his open-door immigration policy. But now, people who think Blair was too Tory (I did – I left Labour in 1997) are giving the actual Tories a free run.

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It would have been relatively easy to persuade the EU to take another look at free movement – easy compared with sorting out the unknowable nightmare of disengagement. It should be the EU that provides funding for extra social housing, extra healthcare, extra school places, extra physical infrastructure, in places that are prosperous enough to attract migrant workers. It should be the EU that raises concerns when people are leaving one place in large numbers, and rolls up its sleeves to assist them in solving those problems locally. Europe will realise that soon enough, and we will be looking on as it does.

Instead, we will be continuing as we have been for decades, pandering to the elites we’re supposed to be escaping. The elites decide how much they are prepared to contribute in tax towards the social and physical infrastructure they operate in. They’d rather do it privately, bleeding interest for their chiselling loans out of the public sector. They will always have free movement for themselves, and the threat that they will make use of it. It’s so easy for them to get their way.

They will always manage to bring in cheap staff from abroad, when and if they want it, safe in the knowledge that it’s the cheap staff, not them, who will bear the brunt of the anger of the people they refuse to employ because they want fair wages and decent conditions. People will learn the hard way how much Nigel Farage cares about their lives, how much Rupert Murdoch frets about their poor pay.

These men want ordinary people to be angry, because angry people make errors of judgment, blaming each other instead of the elites that plunder ideas about equality, fairness, freedom and democracy for their own ends. Britain. You voted for this. Now, once again, get ready to be told that There Is No Alternative.

If you want to understand how little the elites care, just look at David Cameron’s referendum promise. He was so blithely certain that his preferred outcome would win that he clearly took no time at all to ponder what might happen if he lost. He’ll have a nice life, whatever happens.

No one can predict what sort of outcome might emerge from his capricious gamble, and it doesn’t look like we’ll even get to vote again until all of that is done and dusted. Europe doesn’t crush our democracy. It protects what’s left of it. Now that protection is gone and our limited, gestural, dysfunctional democracy is all we have.