The EU referendum is announced, and less than a year after its humiliation at the last general election, the dismal science of opinion polling is back. A YouGov survey in Wednesday’s Times, for instance, led off with news that, once the all-important don’t-knows had been excluded, 51% of its respondents wanted out, while 49% favoured staying in. Some 26% said David Cameron had got Britain “a good deal”, but 35% thought the opposite.

There was also the revelation that when “thinking about the referendum”, 17% were said to “trust” Michael Gove, while 10% feel the same about the employment minister Priti Patel. That is surely more than have actually heard of her, but whatever: this stuff is often what passes for a nuanced understanding of the public mood.

On the remain side, a flimsy grasp of the real world is reflected in another problem: the idea that anyone who wants to leave the EU must in some way be irrational, old-fashioned, or simply unhinged. At Westminster, such views have long been focused on the politicians and activists now at the forefront of the leave campaign – witness Cameron’s infamous description of Ukip as a collection of “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists”, or one of his allies’ characterisation of Tory Eurosceptics as “mad, swivel-eyed loons”.

On the left, one hears the same view of senior outers – as fantasists, eccentrics and xenophobes. And behind all this, there also seems to lurk an unspoken view of the millions of Britons for whom senior leave campaigners claim to speak: as gullible, if people are feeling charitable; as nasty and bigoted, when things turn cruel. Class, moreover, is a subtext that is never too far away.

If you doubt this, think back to May 2014, and a plague of tweets with the hashtag #WhyImVotingUkip, which continued sporadically for the next 18 months. “I wasn’t educated very well and because of this I’m going to blame smelly immigrants as the reason I can’t get a job,” went one; “Because I’m uneducated, uncultured, white and old,” said another. Strange how supposedly “progressive” types can have such a dim view of their fellow human beings.

I will be voting to stay in on 23 June, essentially because of three convictions: first, that if we are ever to somehow tame international capital, a supranational institution spanning a reasonable swath of the planet will be a necessity; second, that the UK’s continued membership represents some vague counterbalance to those who would like to turn the place into a neoliberal hellhole; and third, that there is a lot to be said for the idea that the EU has kept Europe from once again bursting into flames.

Most of my beliefs on Europe are as awash with emotional factors and shaky optimism as anyone else’s

Given the institution’s recent history, the first two of those convictions are increasingly more a matter of faith than anything really evidence-based, which leaves me with the somewhat finely balanced case recently summed up by the website Open Democracy: “The European Union is an undemocratic corporate stitch-up. But leaving would be worse.” In other words, most of my beliefs on Europe are as awash with emotional factors and shaky optimism as anyone else’s.

More to the point, I have been to enough places where Euroscepticism runs deep and wide to have a strong respect for its basic position. Whenever the remain side gets too full of itself, I remember my trip to the agricultural centre of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, where a third of the local population now come from eastern European countries. Though the next generation might be starting to mix and integrate via the wonders of state education, the result for now is a profound sense of tension: a 2014 study reckoned that 68% of voters in the town’s parliamentary constituency would choose Brexit.

I also think of Peterborough, where the same study put the share of out voters at 60% – and though things are not quite as troubled, much the same problems are ever present, and highly unlikely to be altered by Cameron’s new deal. Or maybe Great Yarmouth (a whopping 69% Eurosceptic), where scores of people claimed that a big meat processing plant now recruited most of its workers on the continent, leaving locals shut out, and convinced they were at the blunt end of a serious injustice.

Those stories are not just about immigration and free movement, nor how hollow those assurances about the EU underwriting jobs and prosperity can often sound. They are also centred on huge and rapid social changes that people feel have been imposed on them by a power beyond anyone’s reach. And on that specific point, to all intents and purposes, they are right.

Back in 1974, Tony Benn visited Brussels and wrote about facing “people with more power than I had and no accountability to anybody”. Forty years on people all over the country, often living in the most precarious circumstances, feel exactly the same imbalance as a matter of lived experience.

Their feelings, moreover, blur into the way the referendum speaks to something that a lot of politicians and most of the media will still not touch. Though it will have profound consequences for the UK as a whole, the vote is essentially an English political event: an attempt to resolve English tensions within an essentially English party, which will see the leave side speaking to a group of people who increasingly self-identify as English, and who feel that an antipathy to authority is now part of their national identity.

The EU fits into this because it is another power centre that highlights an inescapable fact: that while Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have been given a greater say in their affairs, England still largely goes without.

This is why the senior leave campaigner David Davis was recently quoting Chesterton (“we are the people of England, that never have spoken yet”), and the Daily Mail ran its pantomime-Eurosceptic “Who will speak for England?” front page. Whatever their motivations, the resentments they wanted to play on are real – and rational. And the fact they regularly explode to the benefit of the political right surely represents one of the left’s biggest modern failures.

For the next four months, all of these tensions will be brought to the boil. Those who want Britain to stay in the European Union need to acknowledge them, think deeply, and not so lightly dismiss what their side is up against. Because if they don’t, the great calamities of which they warn will be all the more likely to come to pass.