TIG's reheated ideology has failed us since the Blair years

In the referendum of two and half years ago, Swindon, a town of nearly 200,000, voted by 55 to 45 per cent – somewhat above the national average – to leave the European Union. That vote seemed to get its comeuppance this week with news that one of the town’s biggest sources of employment, the Honda car factory, will soon be closing with the loss of 3,500 jobs.

The company denies that Brexit has anything to do with it. Yet as one of its soon to be made redundant employees told the Financial Times, even accepting it was not the deciding factor, “you’d be an idiot to think Brexit hasn’t contributed”.

But here’s the interesting thing. The employee knew the risks when voting to Leave, and now that they have materialised, he still has no regrets. Rather, he blames the Government’s crass mishandling of the process since then. And he is also angry about the way Brexit has been allowed so completely to consume the political class that the underlying discontents that led to the vote in the first place have been almost wholly forgotten.

All sense of purpose has become lost in process, with Parliament now widely seen to be engineering a watered down version of what had been voted for, or even no Brexit at all. Once filled with promise, Brexit has transmogrified into a bureaucratic leviathan, and in so doing it has left virtually no room for anything else.