We know plenty of EU families from school, many of the best staff where I work are from the EU, I know techie freelancers from the EU who’ve contributed a lot to the local tech community since moving here. People who are genuinely part of local life have suddenly been made to feel really unwelcome, and it *really* doesn’t feel right. It feels nasty.

A problem is that the so-called “debates” that have been going on all refer to something monolithic called “immigrants”, and in the unitary sense intended there’s no such thing; arguments like “immigrants is good” vs “immigrants is bad” just aren’t talking about the same people. What you’re talking about is the comfortable articulate middle-class world, which is a million miles away from 20 blokes forced to sleep in a damp garden shed in between picking cabbages, being charged half their pitiful wage for “rent” and “transport” and being used to undercut guys from Boston or Spalding (who would have worked, but not like this). Similar things apply across our wrecked manufacturing base (aka almost everything north of Cambridge). Everyone in this system is getting screwed except the scumbags running it. And even worse is the system which facilitates and encourages it.

There is a huge and growing disconnection between happy middle-class life in urban centres and this kind of thing down at the dirty end — they’re different planets, different universes. One message I saw, from someone in London about the petition for London to become a separate state, says “Why should I bother about what people in Sunderland think? I feel I have more in common with Paris or Berlin than Sunderland!” Leaving aside that this person has obviously never been to the wastelands of the Paris banlieue, that says it all, really. The referendum was swung by a huge slab of population who are being taken for granted and ignored in precisely this “you don’t count” manner.

These folk feel (correctly) that nobody is representing them. And as I said before, then they start to pin it on something called “immigrants”; very few of ’em are in a position to think out what’s actually going on, who’s responsible for doing what to them and where any blame might lie. When you add this to austerity-slashed services stretched to breaking and near collapse even before the new arrivals, they tend to blame the new arrivals rather than the system driving them.

You and I were brought up to be able to go down the well to where your intuitions are, and come back with a usably coherent description. Lots of people don’t do that; they have the intuitions but can’t articulate them, so they hang the feel of it on anything they can find, eg “foreigners”. If you demonstrate to them that what they’re saying is wrong, they just look uncomfortable and shift ground, because it was never about that in the first place. Just because they can’t articulate, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem or that they should be ignored; they’re humans with real, immediate problems. Yes, a very few will be impossible neurotic bigots at a deep psychological level, but the majority are simply trying to say something and can’t manage it. The happy middle-class urban world tends to mock this or be sanctimonious about it in a PC way (“racists!”); I find this cruel and disgusting.

Remember, we don’t have a “working class” any more; it’s been split up and invisible-ised, in your lifetime. Using the fundamental British class snobbery that nobody wishes to think of themself as “working class”, the brighter end was dressed-up in middle-class fancy dress (home ownership, university) and saddled with huge debts (mortgages, tuition fees). The hopeless end was left as a festering invisible underclass. The remainder (majority) of the decent but minimally-skilled thus lost the articulate support of their now middle-class colleagues, along with their identity — this was when Thatcher was deliberately smashing up the country’s industrial base so there were no longer obviously identifiable things like “miners” or “steelworkers” but just a fragmented mess that could be exploited, along with terminally demonised unions. The outcome is zero-hours contracts etc without any serious mechanism for fighting back, and a despairing sense of being unrepresented at any level.

The “nobody is representing me” feel I think is a characteristic of the Age of Management I’ve been banging on about, but has come to a head now. Look at the row in Labour for a perfect example: do any of these silly sods who are attacking Corbyn take even a moment to think “Er…. our electoral base is completely at odds with us, so how about we find out what they think?”; instead they’re just going “Oh, silly proles, they don’t understand what’s good for them, it must be that we haven’t told them hard enough” (aka “we haven’t got our message across”). No, chum, you’re supposed to be listening to ’em, not lecturing ’em. Even I am sick of this patronising we-know-what’s-best-for-you crap to the point where I no longer know who I could vote for and don’t feel anyone is representing me; but I’m comfortably off and not immediately threatened, whereas these folk feel extremely threatened, with justification.

And the EU as we have it is the epicentre and exemplar of this stuff, of “never mind what you think, it’s all going to be this way”. Look what they did to Greece last year. Look at the arrogantly stupid EU reactions to Brexit (same approach as the Corbyn attackers; nothing being learned, nothing being heard).

All the EU directives (which are obligatory to member states) all point in one direction:- privatisation (“opening up public infrastructure to competition”, ie rendering cross-subsidy — and hence the concept of a “service” — impossible), reduction of union power, free movement of workers in a divide-and-rule way that facilitates undercutting etc etc, all designed to benefit business. It all hangs together, and chimes perfectly with the reduction of participatory democracy exemplified in the EU structure.

Had the EU said way back at the beginning “we’re proposing to knock all your countries together and make one big one” (which was the project from the start and is the only way the Euro can possibly work), nobody would have considered it for a moment; so instead, it’s been smuggled in, bit by bit, year by year, all based on the principle “we know what’s best for you”. As I said the other week, I think that’s what’s behind the perpetual complaint “we don’t have enough information”, which sounds uncannily like what I remember in 1975; the information’s easy to find if you look, but they’re picking up (correctly) on a sense that something’s going on which they aren’t being told about. “Not feeling represented” is one expression of this.

The referendum result is about a class divide as much as anything. Did you see that woman in (I think) Hartlepool, weeping quietly and saying “we got our country back! we got our country back!” over and over? Is it proposed that these people are just stupid and should be dropped down a hole? Of course, we only have the possibility of “getting our country back”, we haven’t got it yet; but I’m inclined to agree with her formulation. I prefer it to accepting Schauble (German finance minister) and his current proposal for an unelected invisible Special Person with power to veto the budget of any government in the EU if the ECB (controlled by the Bundesbank) doesn’t approve of it; that counts as ”losing your country” for all practical purposes.

And I don’t think “wanting your country back” is about nostalgia. It’s possible that the concept of the nation state may need to turn into something else, but not like this (just the same as Communism might have been a good idea, but not like that).