What belongs to you and where do you belong? How do you know those things? More pertinently: how do you feel them? Where do you go that is a shared space with others and that in some vague way belongs to all of us and yet none of us individually? A car park, a library, a swimming pool, a community centre? Do you feel comfortable there? Now that so many town centres consist of little but boarded up shops and bookies, where do you hang out for free if you are young, or old, or scared, or lonely? What happens when the places that belong to you are taken away ?

I ask because this has already happened. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, with the Huffington Post, have fleshed out this loss with cold, hard figures. Since 2014/15, more than 12,000 public spaces have been sold and £9.1bn has been raised by local councils selling property. As councils have had their funding slashed by central government, they have sold off everything they can in order to keep basic services going. But, unbelievably, many councils have used the money raised from selling off their assets to make redundancy payments to the workers they’re getting rid of. Yes, that’s right – all this somehow made economic sense to George Osborne, the wrecking ball who now has a part-time job as editor of the London Evening Standard.

This policy is always referred to as “austerity” and I hate that word because it is a con, seeming neutral rather than representing deliberate, everyday brutality. We have lived through this era and yet we find one of its consequences, Brexit (another stupid made-up word), now quite mad rather than logical. The policies the Tories pursued under David Cameron did not even make sense in terms of their own internal logic. The poorest were to pay off the imaginary deficit, which was redefined as somehow their responsibility .

The result is that nowhere belonged to them any more. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Go to any deprived area and that is what people will tell you and you can rattle on about some great art gallery in some great city being free and it means sod all. Shared space, civic space, makes people stakeholders in their community. That has been slipping away from us for years.

You may have been lucky enough not to notice it. You just drove past the new boxy flats being built in former council buildings. You hadn’t been to the library in years anyway because … well, because of Google and because we all have to tighten our belts or something.

And now the magic money tree is in bloom again with Theresa May offering different bribes – actually small change – to leave-voting towns in the north and the Midlands. This is cynical beyond belief, but take the money and run because, Christ knows, it is needed.

Several myths have been busted by Brexit which is, whether we like it or not, some kind of reckoning. One is that people vote only out of economic self-interest. The accusatory narrative of remainers is like shouting at someone who is self-harming, “Do you understand that this is unhealthy?” when, of course, they bloody well do. All the talk about standing alone and not needing anyone else is defensive, sure, but it is a comprehensible reaction to feeling both attacked and abandoned.

One abstract noun (austerity) did not simply cause another abstract noun (Brexit), but let us finally give up the delusion that everything just went mad, out of nowhere, in 2016. The damage, the deliberate harm, the destruction of the public sphere and public space had, for years, been going much further than anything Thatcher dreamed of. Cameron and Osborne carpet-bombed the social fabric of our nation. In seeking to patch up flesh wounds with pathetic bribes, May could not make this more abundantly clear.