Today we leave the EU, but the progressive European future we crave isn’t dead yet

If one goal is returning to the European Union – and for many of us it certainly is – that will take years and a radical shift on both sides

The seed of this self-mutilation was sown in the war that generated the myth of eternal national superiority. So it feels as fitting as it is brazenly predictable to dwell on a Winston Churchill quote in this dark hour.

If doing so makes me sound like a liberal-left fairground mirror image of Mark Francois or Peter Bone, so be it. One tiny consolation is that the ultras will be as bereft today as those who marched for the chance to reverse the referendum and signed the petition to revoke Article 50.

For the 48 per cent, the battle is lost and there is no glib sugarcoating that poison pill. But it need not be fatal. The fight for a more just and egalitarian European future goes on. As Churchill told his cabinet in 1940, when under huge pressure to do a deal with Hitler: “Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those who surrender tamely are finished.”

We went down fighting. Millions upon millions of people were not only betrayed by the cabal of billionaire-controlled reactionary newspapers and potty Tory imperial nostalgists. They were born as political activists.

For so long, the great political conundrum has been how the hell do you get the young to shape their futures by voting in similar numbers to the old. If they did, as a glance at post-election demographic analysis confirms, the Conservatives would be driven so far towards the civilised centre as to be unrecognisable to No 10’s current inhabitant. Progressive politics would be, well if not guaranteed, then at least in appearance cabinet table in perpetuity.

The process of recovery and renewal won’t be quick or easy. It will require a fundamental change in mindset as well as voting patterns. It could use a written constitution that buries the systemic autocratic centralism that has plagued Britain for centuries, and dictated the antidemocratic fiasco of the last two years. Fat chance of that.

But the desire for change exists. If even a minuscule proportion of Final Say marchers and supporters are more inspired by the battle than crushed by the defeat, the future could be gloriously different from the rancid recent past.

If one goal is returning to the European Union – and for many of us it certainly is – that will take years and a radical shift on both sides.

To even consider taking us back, the EU would have to be persuaded that the United Kingdom (if it survives as such) wants more than the economic benefits of the union. It will need to know that it is regarded as a group of friends with broadly shared values, not as a monolithic enemy perched menacingly across the English Channel.

To do that demands far more than the overdue breaking of the British addiction to wartime mythologising. It demands the redistribution of wealth, power and life chances to the regions that opted overwhelmingly to leave – and for the Boris Johnson’s promise to “get Brexit done”. The vote of the 2016 EU referendum wasn’t primarily against Brussels. It was a wild howl of protest against the arrogant dominance of the city state of London.

Time will play a part. The elderly who vote Tory purely out of financial self-interest, and who voted Leave solely out of nostalgia, will be replaced by those whose futures they have narrowed and who have no muscle memory of great power status.

But natural wastage won’t suffice on its own. You get the politicians you deserve. To have a shot at getting the ones you want, you have to vote for them. To be certain, you have to become them.

The progressive European future we crave is further away, yes, but it isn’t dead. It’s out there on the far horizon, awaiting an explosion of political passion and involvement.

Seeds have been sown by this proxy war. Whether they flower into something sweeter-smelling than the turd blossom of today is in the hands of those who marched – in body and in spirit – on Westminster.