My record on political soothsaying is by no means perfect. But tonight, for the first time since the Tory triumph in the General Election last May, I am starting to feel optimistic for a Leave triumph in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union, which we now know will take place on June 23rd. The arguments for Remain have already been rehearsed and written off as Project Fear. They will not grow stronger with repetition. All the positive noises, all the energy and excitement, the populism, the passion, the patriotism belong to Leave. I have been amazed to see the freedom and frankness with which even hitherto rigidly loyal journalists at the Telegraph and the Mail have, almost without exception, derided Cameron’s so-called “deal” with the other 27 member states and declared for Leave. It is said that up to half of the Tory parliamentary party will campaign for Leave, an unknown number of them mindful only that victory for this great cause will very likely remove Cameron from office and put Boris Johnson in his place. But that is but a small detail of the huge change - a genuine metapolitical shift - which will be triggered by a Leave victory. Let us just consider that for a moment.

The European Union is a project for the elites. It is one of the principal engines of globalism, and it is immensely ambitious as such. It offers a vision of an eventual multiracial, non-democratic unitary state concerned to expand to the eastern and southern borders of Russia, into Turkey and the Levant, North Africa (via the Barcelona Process), and, in time, across the Sahara and into the rest of the African continent. All this is a matter of record. But none of it would be remotely open to consideration were it not for the four grand, overlapping developments in the politics of the West in the late 20th century: the triumph of Capital over the command economy; that of political internationalism over nationalism; that of elitism over democracy; that of business and banking over peoples and populism. These four triumphs winnowed national politics in the West, leaving us with the machine politician, the career politician; and his economically neoliberal and socially neo-Marxist, identikit parties; and ushered in an era of corruption, cynicism and betrayal.

Not unnaturally, this model of power politics has come under attack in every one of the European democracies. In the UK, although nationalism has failed to lay a glove on it, euroscepticism has not. True, UKIP could not break through with Westminster seats last May. But David Cameron was forced to write into his party’s election manifesto a promise that, if successful, a Conservative government would hold a simple in-out referendum on EU membership by the end of next year. At the time of the election the polls were very tight, and doubtless Cameron expected, at best, to be back in Downing Street with support from the Liberal Democrats. They, of course, would never sanction any kind of challenge to their beloved project in nation destroying. In the event the LibDems collapsed, Labour failed miserably, and Cameron won a most unexpected majority. But ... he was now lumbered with that manifesto promise. Plainly, he and his advisers thought they would have little difficulty in repeating the success of Project Fear in the Scottish IndyRef. After all, who would remember Cameron’s Bloomberg speech, in which he had talked of a deep reform of the institutions of the European Union and of the UK’s relationship with it. Nobody. They’ll all just vote for the status quo ... for what they know, won’t they? Simple.

But now it’s starting to look like change is coming on 23rd June. The return to independence of the UK will deliver a mighty blow to the process of ever greater union, energising dissent throughout the Union; ramping up costs for the other contributor member states, of which I believe only five or six will be left; and showing once again that the people do not want what the elites want, but still love and value their nation states and long to preserve them as independent and whole, functioning entities. With Schengen almost dead now, the euro in permanent crisis, the European economies seemingly permanently enfeebled, and the second largest economy negotiating its departure from the Union for good, the credibility of an EU elite which insists that the project must be advanced with ever more speed and determination will be tested and will be found wanting. The Union could already be fatally wounded. It might take years to die or it might happen with the dispatch that attended the collapse of communism in the east in 1989.

For nationalists this is a highly significant moment. The pendulum has surely begun its long, stately swing back towards our politics. We are in no way ready for what will come.