If I’d told you just four years ago that I was a Remainer, you wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. The fact that we now speak about little else reveals an under-appreciated fact about politics – that power consists not merely in getting your own way when conflict arises, but in shaping the agenda.

Back in 2015 less than 10% (pdf) of people thought relations with the EU were the important political issue – far fewer than cited the NHS, economy or crime. And yet a handful of cranks have succeeded in making Brexit (a word almost unheard in 2015) dominate politics to the exclusion of all else.

In fact not only have they succeeded in transforming the agenda, but they have also changed our very identities. I couldn’t have told you I was a Remainer back in 2015 because I wasn’t: I didn’t give the EU enough thought to have it influence my perception of myself. Today, though, we are almost all Leavers or Remainers.

Most of us think of ourselves as autonomous individuals with minds of our own. And yet we have allowed others not only to determine what we talk about, but even how we identify ourselves. In this sense, we are prisoners of the right.

This is one reason why many of us on the left have been loath to engage with the day-to-day minutiae of Brexit: we are reluctant to let ourselves be defined by the cranky right.

When Corbyn said last week that:

the real divide in our country is not between those who voted to Remain in the EU and those who voted to Leave. It is between the many – who do the work, who create the wealth and pay their taxes, and the few – who set the rules, who reap the rewards and so often dodge taxes.

He was rightly expressing a frustration with the fact that the right has dominated what we talk about and how we perceive the country and ourselves.

Brexit is, however, only the biggest example of how the right shapes the agenda. In the early 2010s, the Tories persuaded even the so-called impartial media that government debt was a big economic problem when of course it wasn’t. This shaped the political agenda in a way that wouldn’t have happened if people had looked at bond markets instead of blowhards.

We see other examples almost every day. The imbecilities of narcissists such as Young, Hopkins, Morgan and the moron-speak shows on the BBC determine what gets discussed.

Very often, of course, these are utter trivialities: the latest is an advert for razor blades FFS. Only very rarely are they about how the 1% have, to a large extent, captured our political system for their own purposes. Which only vindicates what Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz wrote (pdf) in 1962:

Power may be, and often is, exercised by confining the scope of decision -making to relatively “safe” issues.

Not only has the left been too passive in the face of this, it has often been complicit – too willing to pile into irrelevant debates chosen by the right. Too many leftists are, to some extent, sheeple.

To reinforce my point, consider the alternative – that you decide what issues are important not on the basis of what some idiot says but according to your own expertise and experience. Such issues might include: the adverse effects of high inequality; austerity; the decade-long stagnation in productivity and real wages; the degradation of work; the spread of managerialism to the detriment of professionalism; adverse selection mechanisms in the political-media system that promote bullshitters and idiots; a lack of deliberative democracy; a tax system that’s excessively complicated and which under-taxes land; an overly-complex and under-generous benefits system. And so on, and so on.

A good example of what I mean is James Bloodworth’s Hired: his own efforts and experience got us talking about otherwise neglected issues of poor working conditions. The problem is that it takes sustained repetition to change the agenda, not just one man’s work.

When we talk about issues chosen by the right – be they Brexit or immigration or the provocations of narcissists, we are not talking about other issues: there is, remember, such a thing as opportunity cost.

And this creates a bias against the left, because we are fighting on terrain chosen by the right. The fact that it is complicit in this choice of agenda is perhaps the most grievous of the BBC’s biases.

Now, there’s an obvious objection here: sometimes, we need to fight defensive battles.

This is true of Brexit – although we must realize (as I fear too many Remain fanatics do not) that even if Brexit is defeated the countless social, economic and political defects that contributed to it will stay in place.

I’m not so sure though, that it’s true of the endless “calling out” of the MorganYoungO’Neill brigade. Andrew Neil told us why when he tweeted the other day that the Spectator had gained subscriptions after Owen Jones had accused it of supporting Fascists. The problem is that a combination of biases – the backfire effect, attitude polarization and mere exposure – can cause such calling out to backfire. In attacking the Spectator Owen was giving it free publicity and causing rightists to jump to its support. It might be better – where possible – to ignore such provocations. Neil Morgan and suchlike get work because people watch them. Ignore them, and they’ll go away.

Even if I’m wrong on this, though, my main point holds. For too long, the left has been merely reactive to the right’s choice of agenda. It must become proactive and shape that agenda.