Whether there ever was a special relationship that benefitted us in the long term is for others to debate. The idea that this relationship still exists has had a crippling effect on our foreign and defence policy, and has often meant that our country’s long-term interests have been subjected to the short-term demands of our American ally. Brexit will allow this relationship to be recast.

An equally important part of the repositioning of Britain in the world will be the trading links that have to be built upon and greatly expanded. This is not a question of compensating for our lost EU market. The EU holds a huge trading surplus in its favour. This will result, as Sir James Dyson has publicly stated, in the EU’s concession of a free-trade agreement with us. Britain’s repositioning on trade is about how we restructure our economy so that we balance our current account without constantly relying on the inward movement of capital (to be welcomed for other reasons) and the sale of British industry assets (a most unwelcome development) to do so. It is easy to write these words. The task is Herculean. Again one has to question whether the government has yet got the measure of the task for its industrial strategy, and, if it has, why it has settled on a machinery that is so inadequate to deliver that objective.

These are fundamental criticisms of a government embarking on a strategy that no set of politicians has had to undertake since Britain’s fight for survival in 1940 without a governmental machinery that has been reshaped to deliver success.

The government has, however, rightly laid down that one of the cornerstones in its negotiations with Europe — as opposed to the repositioning of Britain in the world — is that we will control our borders. From this decision our negotiations with the EU will commence. 

The referendum vote marks a genuine revolt by the masses, and by those people who have the least hold on Britain’s wealth but the greatest affection for their country. This group has had to put up with an ever-growing Europhile elite who have constantly sold Britain short. It is noticeable that in all the time Brian Griffiths spent at the heart of the Thatcher government, as he revealed in the September issue of Standpoint, he never once met a top civil servant who expressed even the slightest whiff of doubt about the European programme in which they had helped trap the British people. This “sell-out” was never more clearly expressed than in the elite’s insistence on an open borders policy and, with it, mass immigration. 

But will the Brexit vote be the first of a whole series of transformative actions which not only repudiate the cross-party consensus that our own place is at the very heart of the EU, but begin to build a new chapter in the nation’s history? The government says the vote to leave the EU will be implemented and its strategy is shaped around the control of our borders. This is, I believe, the first move but it must only be a first move.