To quote those legendary Englishmen the Beatles, it was 20 years ago today (or thereabouts). In autumn 1996, the Tory-run Department of National Heritage issued a press release featuring the term “Cool Britannia”. Tony Blair and the prime movers of New Labour were already on that political wavelength. In his conference speech the previous year, Blair had said that he aspired to make Britain “a young country … with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to … ready for the day’s challenge: ambitious, idealistic, united”. By the following year, a new Labour government was working on nothing less than “the rebranding of Britain”. Now, ruinously, we have been rebranded again.

This time it is all about England. As the UK continues to fracture and Scotland goes its own way, England is the country that media people and politicians might still rarely mention by name, but which completely dominates the post-referendum foreground. In this context, England is the nation for which Theresa May claims to speak, and which preoccupies many Labour politicians: a country of hardcore Brexit supporters, St George’s flags hung out on Kent housing estates – and, to paraphrase Blair, immigration, immigration, immigration. In contrast to that bright 1990s vision of a future UK, it is, moreover, an old country, whose dotage is portrayed as a matter of crabby resentment, a place where there is a collective wish to lock all the doors.

This newly rebranded place underpinned one of the key plot lines that ran through this year’s conference season. In Liverpool, for all Jeremy Corbyn’s claims to be “relaxed” about immigration, some of his own MPs were voicing a sudden hostility to the principle of free movement, which peaked when the Leeds MP Rachel Reeves said immigration had turned her Leeds constituency into a “tinderbox”. A week later came all that Tory nastiness in Birmingham, with a serving home secretary floating serious plans to make companies declare the number of non-British workers on their books, a monstrous illiberal idea that Tories were , amid much furore, forced to abandon. But there was also Jeremy Hunt, with the support of the prime minister, boasting of his plan, which apparently endures, to minimise the numbers of foreign doctors. This was an English proposal in every way: aimed at an English audience by a minister who, thanks to devolution, sees only to the English NHS.

Steel Pulse perform at a 1978 concert organised by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism in east London. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns

It was telling perhaps, that as the Labour party fumbled, the most pointed response came from a trio of voices that included the leaders of the UK’s two progressive nationalist parties: Nicola Sturgeon and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood, who joined the Greens’ Caroline Lucas in rightly decrying “the most toxic rhetoric on immigration we have seen from any government in living memory”.

We are in a bad place, but we didn’t get there overnight. Over the past 10 years or so, a small set of English people and organisations have led the toxic recasting of their country. Nigel Farage and his de facto English nationalist party didn’t just push the EU to the top of the political agenda, they also created the impression that they spoke for a forgotten nation. And then there were the English grassroots Conservatives, most of whom raged against David Cameron’s modernisation drive, such as it was. A big role has also been played by the great minds at those self-consciously English media outlets, the Mail and the Express. Witness the Mail’s “Who will speak for England?” front page, used this year to open its campaigning against the EU.

What distinguishes the point we have reached today is that this poisonous illiberalism, this recasting of the way we view ourselves and the face we show to the world, has been given an official stamp of approval by a group of shameless Tory politicians at the top. Seemingly they are terrified of the people who voted for Brexit, but also they scent a great political opportunity. Shame on them, and their cynicism.

The liberal left also shares responsibility for leaving the question of what England is to more destructive voices

People on the liberal left also have to bear some responsibility, for averting their eyes from the essentially cultural elements of politics, and leaving the question of what England is to altogether more destructive voices. England, after all, is not just the Brexit heartlands. Its other aspects are there in Leeds, Bradford and Manchester; in mischievous, multicultural Bristol; and Leicester, a magnificent English city that represents hope for the future, and people’s ability to get on. London speaks for itself. And there is another England beginning to stir in the supposedly staid suburbs (like the one I grew up in, 12 miles south of Manchester), areas fast filling up with a diverse array of people who have moved beyond the city limits.

‘To paraphrase that great Englishman Billy Bragg, we ought to be looking for a New England.’ Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Even in the places for which May and the Tories now affect to speak, things are more complicated than they seem to think. I have met plenty of English Brexit supporters who have expressed worries about immigration while paying warm tribute to Poles, Czechs and people from the Baltic states as admirable “grafters”, and assets to the places where they have settled. Their kids mix with new arrivals at the local schools, where the children of migrants acquire local accents. Where some people do indeed shout and seethe about immigration, one can nonetheless divine the country that led George Orwell, among others, to celebrate its essential moderation and gentleness (“You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers”).

These things need to be loudly celebrated, and talked about in specifically English terms. But when politicians will not recognise England’s existence, let alone the fight for its soul, how will that happen? Those of us who live in England and feel a profound attachment to it ought to wake up to a simple truth: that our country is being stolen away, and repainted in truly ugly colours. What is afoot is as much cultural as political, and it will take much more than conventional politics to turn things round. This is a moment: one that demands the attention of musicians, writers, dramatists, journalists – and the millions of people in England who surely feel a deep dismay about what is happening.

And if we want the beginnings of an idea about what to do, we could look back not to the giddy, superficial 1990s, but to a much more troubled period: the late 1970s, when a surge of largely English racism and bigotry was killed off by trailblazing creations such as Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and a great counter-movement – a movement of people that went right to society’s roots. I do not know what form a 21st-century version of that fight will look like, but I do know we need one. To paraphrase that great Englishman Billy Bragg, we ought to be looking for a New England. That feels now like a matter of urgency.