“Have you forgotten yet?” No scriptwriter would have had the audacity to end the most incredible week in British politics with those words. With a poem. And not any old poem but one by the greatest war poet of them all, Siegfried Sassoon, read in finest Rada tones by the actor Charles Dance to the heads of various European nations. Right at the moment, Govey was launching his leadership bid.

“Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’” said Dance directly to David Cameron’s face in front of a memorial to 72,000 dead whose remains were never identified. Not even Richard Curtis could have got away with that, with a poem called – wait for it – Aftermath. In the week in which Cameron’s power play saw Britain crash out the European project, a union, lest one forget, that was born from the wreckage of another world war with the express intention of yoking together historical enemies as trading partners.

But then last week defied the normal laws of civilisational physics. It was plainly ridiculous to have Britain’s newest, most dastardly politician, fresh from knifing his colleague in the back, deliberately scheduling his leadership bid against the memorial service in order to explain away why so few MPs were there. As it was strangely, movingly weird to have silent soldiers in first world war uniforms shuffling through the nation’s railway terminuses exactly one week on from the result that put a bomb beneath us and our relationship with Europe forever.

Politics is broken. In every way. In our current system, those votes simply don’t count. Voices aren’t heard

Did you see the soldiers? Lounging around Glasgow station and Birmingham New Street and Waterloo, smoking cigarettes and waiting to be sent off to the slaughter. A brilliant piece of performance art orchestrated by Jeremy Deller and an army of volunteers to show the pathos of young men manipulated by a rightwing jingoistic press to believe that they were helping to restore the nation’s pride. I mean, Jesus. You can’t make this stuff up. Cut to Gove, the man who tore up the nation’s history curriculum on the grounds it wasn’t nationalistic enough, expounding on how he is going to restore the nation’s pride.

It was ordinary, working men and their families who suffered the most, of course. It always is. The villages and towns that signed up most enthusiastically were the ones who were hit the hardest. We’ll have to wait and see how Brexit pans out but a week after I went to Ebbw Vale to report on how a town that had perhaps received more in EU funds than any other and voted overwhelmingly to Leave, I Googled “EU Wales” and found the grand sum of three articles. “David Cameron warns the UK cannot guarantee the same funding for Wales as the EU,” said the headline in the Independent.

This is democracy, we’re told. But it’s democracy based on fear and ignorance. The people of Ebbw Vale didn’t know what the EU had done for them because nobody told them. They’re not stupid, they’ve been grossly manipulated, fed a pack of lies that shows every likelihood of coming back and biting them on the arse. Even if it were true that the £350m a week will go to the NHS, it would still rip a hole in the entire Welsh economy. The 29,000 apprenticeships the EU pays for, gone. The £352.9m that’s been earmarked for “skills for growth”. The $243.8 for “youth employment”. The £191.8m for “tackling poverty”.

The reasons for leaving – or the ones that people told me – were pro forma: the words of politicians and spin doctors of the Leave campaign and the journalists of the Sun and Mail. Politicians and spin doctors and journalists who live in London and played upon people’s suspicion and contempt of distant elites to deliver them a result that will lay them at the mercy of a distant elite – only this time, one that will be free to ignore them.The EU is many things but the one thing that the Labour party failed to point out at any stage of the campaign is that it’s the most successful wealth redistribution scheme this country has ever seen.

But then where was the counter-argument? Nowhere. Local newspapers barely exist these days. And the national press… well, there’s a certain lack of giving a shit about anywhere beyond the M25. Unless it’s football. Does any national newspaper on a non-match day even have a correspondent in Wales?

This isn’t about Wales though. It’s about what it is to be cannon fodder in the 21st century. Lied to and manipulated and deceived to a point where you will vote for an outcome that will impoverish you and make life harder for your children.

Brexit is not the Battle of the Somme. Millions will not die – hopefully. But it’s worth remembering that it took carnage on the fields of Europe to finally reform the electoral system of the day. Those men – the ones who went off to die – never voted for that. It took 956,000 soldiers to be slaughtered in the mud for the House of Commons to countenance giving them that. To give all men – not just those who owned property – over the age of 21, the vote.

But what will it take this time? Because politics is broken. In every way. In our current system, those votes simply don’t count. Voices aren’t heard. Most parliamentary seats are safe or safe-ish.

Meanwhile, vast swaths of the country have no meaningful representation. And Brexit was the first time in a generation that anyone was forced to listen. So isn’t that what we should do? Listen to what it’s telling us. That the political system is broken, defunct, an outdated relic of another age and someone, anyone needs to take an axe to it. A Braxe. A Brevolution. A Briot. The under-18s kicking up about the fact their future has been sold out from under them. Something. Anything.