I n Liverpool, a month or so after the Brexit referendum vote, I tried that old foreign correspondent standby: interrogate a taxi driver.

“How did you vote?” I asked. “Brexit, no question,” he said, emphatically, with a challenge implicit in his voice. “Why?” I replied. He told me he had once picked up a distressed woman from a nightclub, late at night, and she told him she had just been sexually assaulted by a north African immigrant.