The UK could use Brexit to get its internal affairs in order. These are my suggestions

A real national discussion about how to make the best of Brexit is well overdue

From the start of the referendum campaign, through the victory Leave, and – for all practical purposes – until now, there has been very little serious discussion about the character and shape of Brexit Britain. Of course, many of us have speculated about how the UK might look and feel once the formal ties with the European Union have been severed and – depending on how we voted – that speculation veers in one way.

Though a fervent Remainer, I have been more agnostic than some in my projections, considering that post-Brexit Britain could become more inward looking, but also, perhaps, that it could start to behave more like a medium-sized country (than a frustrated empire) and begin to take a closer and more appreciative look at its culture. My hope was that this might foster a new self-confidence that would inspire a new generation to embrace the European idea once again with something of the same conviction that the French – or the Scots – show, in their ability to combine national and European identities.

Speculation, though, is one thing. A real national discussion about how to make the best of Brexit – about the opportunities that this break with the post-war past might afford to change the UK for the better – is quite different.

I am indebted here to the young (by my standards!) British academic, Matthew Goodwin, who is professor of politics at the University of Kent and a senior fellow at Chatham House, and has undertaken a special study of the referendum. He does not believe that the Brexit vote is likely to be reversed, and on social media this week, he set out five “big national debates” that, he said, Britain should have had after the Brexit vote, but has not.

These are his five topics: 1. Which political, economic and civic institutions should be moved out of London? 2. How can we regenerate coastal Britain? 3. How can government close the educational divide? 4. How can Britain build a new immigration policy that delivers control and fairness?, and 5. How can we make politics less elitist and more representative of all groups?

Now you may dispute Goodwin’s choice of topics, but I think that at least some of these questions pierce to the heart of the disquiet that besets the UK today. I don’t want to quibble with Goodwin’s questions, but I would like to alter the order, while having a go at some preliminary answers.

It seems to me that the educational divide, above all in England, is the key to almost everything else. How can it be that a handful of expensive schools feeds the top universities whose graduates then dominate the upper echelons of politics and the professions – and increasingly the arts and Olympic sports, too. I am not casting aspersions on Oxbridge here. Most colleges do their damndest to recruit the best, whatever their origins. But like so many pupils, they are hampered by the education system. The gap between the major public schools and the rest has simply grown too wide.

One obvious first step is to legislate to remove the public schools’ charitable status – fat hope, given the number of MPs (and their children) with a vested interest. Another would be to require them to provide half-fee paying, half free-places on the old direct grant model. But it is hard to see the gap shrinking significantly without outright abolition. The introduction of academies and free schools was supposed to diversify schooling to the point where the gap between state and private also narrowed, but there is scant sign of that. No developed country, not even the United States, has as wide a schools gap as England. It narrows prospects and perpetuates an elite. How can politics – to jump to the fifth question – become less elitist and more representative of all groups, when for 40 years, it has been moving the other way?

To stay with politics for a moment, it may be that the balance is shifting, what with the widespread disillusionment with “the Establishment” following the Iraq war and the financial crisis, the appeal of authenticity (away from “spin”), and the more open access for campaigning facilitated by the social media. But look at how fiercely both main party establishments are fighting the Corbyn phenomenon – the latest being the scurrilous claims of Cold War “collaboration”. They are fortunate the British are so averse to revolution.

Immigration, while it appears the most intractable of issues, may in fact be the simplest of Goodwin’s questions to answer – in the short term. The widespread hostility to more immigration would be mitigated to a large degree if the Government of the day could at least show some competence. The borders are porous; we still do not clock people out of the country. Our asylum system is painfully slow and inconsistent. Regulation of work places and housing is dire. The single best answer is just get a grip.

The dominance of London and the parlous state of many coastal towns are aspects of the same weakness: over-centralisation. The need to restore the Houses of Parliament offers a chance not just to have MPs meet in different venues around the country (for a while), but to consider a more modern chamber – such as Scotland’s – which would diminish the adversarial element. My own preference would to pack the City bankers off to Birmingham, or Cardiff – after all, what it does, can all be done online now – and distribute all government departments, with the exception of the Treasury, the Home Office and the Foreign Offices around the country. Let cities bid to host them, as happens with branches of the EU. As for the neglected coast, a new national pride and sense of care for our habitat (which just might come with Brexit) could be part of the remedy.

My national debate would also have a sixth question: what to do with the NHS, once we are forced to understand that it is not in fact the best in the world, that our outcomes for serious conditions are often worse than elsewhere (cancer, perinatal mortality, to name but two), and that we cannot continue to import staff on the cheap. And, no, my answer would not be US-style privatisation. Most of Europe has socialised medicine; it has just found better ways of doing it than we do.

So why, if all these questions not only deserve to be, but perhaps can be, answered, are our politicians – pro-Brexit or not – looking every which way but there? One reason is surely that they, like so many of us, are still fighting the old battle over Europe, and the Government’s seeming disarray allows that battle to continue. And it will not end, so long as one side still harbours hope of the hardest of “hard” Brexits, and the other that the referendum result will be reversed. Few are ready yet to look the post-EU future in the eye and consider how we might mould it for the better. But it is high time, it really is, to open that debate.