Scientists working deep beneath the Swiss Alps notice anomalies in their data indicating the existence of a mysterious particle unknown in the laws of physics. Hundreds of miles away, in a BBC television studio, George Osborne admits to mistakes made during his time in government. The former chancellor regrets that he and David Cameron did not make a better case for British membership of the European Union. Maybe this unprecedented ripple of humility is the substance detected by researchers at Cern. Perhaps the hypersensitive instruments of the Large Hadron Collider registered the blip of Osborne’s conscience.

To be fair, Osborne was reputed to be more thoughtful than Cameron when they were in their pomp, although he came across as meaner in public. His face at rest bears the sneering grimace of a man relishing the smell of his own farts – but there is more to him than cartoon villainy.

The mea culpa on Newsnight last night focused on the failure to secure continued British membership of the EU. Osborne regretted that the government had failed to speak more of the “value of immigration”. He regretted that the case for remain was not assembled sooner, noting that it had been a mistake “to play into the debate that everything that Brussels did was a challenge and a battle and was wrong”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Osborne on Newsnight

There are many reasons why the remain side lost the 2016 referendum, some contingent on the campaign itself and others stretching back decades. It quickly became clear to those whose job it was to make the case for remain that there was no foundation of understanding on which a broad pro-European argument could be erected so late in the day. There was no collective frame of reference to which a cultural appeal could be made, which is why the strategic decision was taken to go in hard on cold, hard-headed economic self-interest – the pitch now discredited as “Project Fear”.

Whether that was the right choice in the last desperate months is a less interesting question than how it came to pass, when such a momentous question was put to the British public, that so few of us really knew anything about how the EU worked, or even what it really was. This is not a judgment on leave voters, by the way. Ignorance of the mechanics and history of European institutions was rife on the remain side, too.

The fundamental misconception, from which most eurosceptic myths flow, is that “Europe” was something done to the UK by other countries. This expressed itself most commonly in the caricature of the European commission as robber-in-chief of national sovereignty, deploying battalions of bureaucrats whose mortal sin is not to have been elected. In reality, the apex of power in the EU is the European council, where heads of government sit. Their number included, until recently, a British prime minister whose voting rights and moral authority reflected the country’s standing as one of the top three continental players – France and Germany being the other two.

If anything, the UK had the best deal of all: the budget rebate and a long list of bespoke opt-outs. So, crudely speaking, most of the time that “Europe” did something, it was aligned with choices made by the British government pursuing their view of the national interest of British voters. But it was often handy to pretend otherwise; to let “Brussels” be a seasonal anti-Santa who whisked democracy up the chimney when difficult choices had to be made.

As Osborne now admits, that game went on too long. When the time came to make the case for Britain continuing to exercise power through its EU membership, amplified by its EU membership, politicians had no practice in saying it with conviction – and no audience used to hearing it.

Play Video 1:30 Polly Toynbee tells George Osborne he was most rightwing chancellor ever – video

The void was deadliest when the argument turned to immigration. There was no political tradition of attaching value, whether cultural or economic, to the idea of free movement. It was seen only as a cost inflicted on “indigenous” workers from the outside, never as a reciprocal benefit. Still today many pro-Europeans are afraid to make the case. Few challenge the idea that ending free movement is an enhancement of national privilege when, in legal and practical terms, it is a curtailment of our rights. It limits the freedoms and opportunities attached to possession of a UK passport as assuredly as it incinerates the security of those other EU citizens who settled in the UK, imagining that their entitlement to call this country home was guaranteed by treaty.

Only 650 of those who will be required to to apply for a new “settled status” have completed the process as part of a pilot scheme. Most of the 3.5 million population of British residents from other EU countries – teachers, nurses, carers, waiters, plumbers, musicians, parents, friends, husbands, wives – must just watch the clock tick down to Brexit day and hope for a happy resolution to their predicament. Their future is underwritten by Brexiteer promises and the reputation of the Home Office. It is hard to imagine two less valuable currencies.

And the bitterest part, the one that Osborne touched on, but still couldn’t quite grasp, is that British politics doesn’t even have a way to articulate what has happened to these people; that they did not arrive as aliens but as citizens; that the “Europe” they were free to move in was the same one we were free to move in; that they were us and that the indignity we inflict on them is something we are ultimately also doing to ourselves.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist