When you hear about Brexit, you think it was a one-off thing. But the mood, the resentment and the anger, and the nastiness and the parochialism have been building for years and years. The people in the Conservative Party largely didn't see it coming, but the people who ran the Brexit campaign did. And they conned all of us.

Journalist Laurie Penny examines the dull, disastrous austerity decade before 2016's Brexit-vote, and traces the Leave victory to a wider series of losses across Britain: of an effective welfare state, of a left opposition strong (or interested) enough to defend it, and of hope for a brighter future - apart from a rented room in Edinburgh.

Laurie wrote the article Brexit, Pursued by Despair for The Baffler.