When I was just starting out as a screenwriter, I was asked to go to Oslo to interview the great explorer Thor Heyerdahl. It was the most glamorous and thrilling thing I’d ever been asked to do. My daughter worried that if I was going far away on a plane I might not get back in time for her class assembly. I told her not to worry. Hopping on a plane to do lunch with global icons was what I did now.

I might have noticed something was up the moment someone pointed out that I was in their seat. I just moved up. If I hadn’t been feeling so entitled I might have started to worry when the surprisingly extravagant in-flight meal was served. I just thought I was worth it. It wasn’t until I finished reading my book that I noticed that the two-hour flight was taking a long time. And covering a lot of ocean.

I asked the woman next to me: “Where is this plane actually going?” She gave a little laugh, like I was making a joke that she didn’t quite get.

Seattle.

I did not make it back for school assembly.

I’ve always used this story as a kind of emblem of creativity. You start out with a destination in mind. You end up somewhere else. As Joe Gillis says in Sunset Boulevard: “I wrote a film about Okies in the Dust Bowl. When it came out it was all set on a torpedo boat.”

Of course it works too as an allegory of where we are heading as a nation. Except that the plane we are flying on seems to have no pilot. Brexit is bigger than Brexit.

The Brexit referendum asked us to settle a question about identity under cover of asking a question about trade

That “are you in or are you out?” question is having a huge cultural as well as political impact. In The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell wrote about how the British “feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis”. Well, it’s a time of crisis and I’m not feeling that. A YouGov poll earlier this month found that 37% of Remainers “would mind” if a close relative married a person who was “a strong supporter of Britain leaving the EU”.

We’ve always been proud of our sense of humour. Which I take to mean a kind of wry self-deprecation. But the Brexit debate has tainted comedy. Our addiction to amusement has led us to put clowns in places of power. You’ll have to wait a long time for anyone on Have I Got News for You to self-deprecate. There are so many others to deprecate first. The Leave vote made the working class politically visible and instantly made them a target. By reframing their motivation as bigotry, it made snobbery acceptable again.

As someone who loves words, I feel privileged to be living at a time when the Guardian’s Marina Hyde is writing but it doesn’t cheer me to think that future generations will call this the Age of the Blistering Insult.

Orwell was sure that once Hitler was defeated, the Home Guard would turn its weaponry on the ruling class and nationalise the banks. A revolutionary Dad’s Army with Flanagan and Allen singing its battle hymn. Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen pop up in Humphrey Jenning’s wartime masterpiece Listen to Britain. They’re singing in a works canteen. The film cuts to Dame Myra Hess playing Bach in the National Gallery, which had been emptied of its paintings, and then to the rattle and clamour of a munitions factory at full pelt. Images of war cut with images of a country worth defending.

Listen to Britain’s energy and power come not from an imposed unity but from contrast. The Brexit referendum asked us to settle a question about identity under cover of asking a question about trade. I asked Twitter what people thought was special about Britain. What did they miss if they lived abroad? That contrast again – queuing and non-conformity. Cadbury’s, you’ll be pleased to know that your chocolate scored very highly. As did Marmite, of course. Surprisingly, our cheeses also polled high. GK Chesterton pointed out that “poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”.

Well, the left has been mysteriously silent on the subject of what is good about this country. And if you don’t know what’s worth defending, how are you going to defend it?

I volunteer as a case worker at Asylum Link, a charity based in a presbytery near where I live. It’s tough to be an asylum seeker. If you need to speak to the Home Office’s asylum helpline, you can be held in the queue for close to an hour. There are days when every phone line in the building is on hold. But once you get through, you will invariably find you’re speaking to decent, well-informed helpful people.

The government’s record on immigration is opportunistic and inept, but that helpline is there because over generations those who went before us have built and bequeathed an infrastructure of decency and competence. Asylum Link itself is there because of a chain of events going back to how local churches reacted when Liverpool became a disease-ridden refugee camp during Ireland’s Great Hunger.

These roots that reach into the past are unsung and often unnoticed. We need to feed them if they are to keep flowering. As a children’s writer, I probably visit as many primary schools as an Ofsted inspector. They are bursting with creativity, kindness and competence. I have never once left one without feeling like I’ve had an injection of hope. Or without reflecting that they are under attack from budget cuts.

A phrase I hear often these days is: “I don’t recognise my own country.” To which I am too polite and British to respond: “Well, go and bloody look for it.”

When we hurl brilliantly turned insults at each other we simplify these issues into badges of identity and while we’re doing that, some very dark forces indeed are gnawing at those roots. Brexit is bigger than politics. Let’s start being bigger than Brexit.

Frank Cottrell Boyce is a screenwriter and novelist