Again it comes back to the machinery of government and whether the capacity and drive exists to meet the task confronting us. By voting to leave, the British public chose to end our 43-year membership of a Common Market that was developed into a European Union with all the lack of safeguards to dissident members that Europe offers. The Brexit vote means that the electorate wants the governing elite to use its energy in representing to the outside world the type of Britain we are fast becoming. This will take a huge amount of imagination and resources, if it is to be achieved successfully. What relevance has a Corbyn-led Labour Party to these momentous developments?

Sadly, very little; for Labour is increasingly making itself irrelevant to this debate. The Parliamentary Labour Party is overwhelmingly made up of Europhile MPs whose main stance has little appeal to the electorate. Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, has been correct in highlighting the role of globalisation as a force for huge losses for our poorest citizens in the short term. But his internationalist position prevents him from having a borders policy or a Labour Party that is relevant to a large sector of the remaining Labour core vote. Labour’s irrelevance to the debate which is beginning to rage on the shape of the new Britain at home and abroad will be seized upon by others, and particularly by UKIP.

Labour has made this UKIP’s opportunity, under its new leader. UKIP are on the right page. The party stands for the politics of identity, locality and links to a culture which is one of shared experiences and memories for local inhabitants. The Labour Party has turned its back on this concern. The problem here is that more than 120 Labour seats voted for Brexit.

These seats are overwhelmingly represented by Europhile Labour MPs. What will these MPs have to say to the UKIP candidate at the next election when all they offer is an undoing of the Brexit decision and a bowl of the same gruel to which the poor have been subjected for the last decade or more?

I have always seen UKIP’s long-term threat to be to the Labour Party while it has been acting as a convenient vehicle for a Tory protest vote. UKIP has replaced the role of the old Liberal Party in gathering such protest votes which, generally speaking, return to the Tory fold at subsequent elections.  

Whether UKIP continues in its current form will partly depend on the antics of Arron Banks, the multimillionaire insurance dealer who backed his own Brexit strategy and is now threatening to form a new right-wing party based on the internet. We may well see Nigel Farage reappear as its leader to exercise his natural talents as a public figure as the pleasures of retirement fade.

If this scenario takes shape, it will clear the way for UKIP to become a centre-left party appealing to Labour voters concerned with identity, culture, place and borders. Presumably in such circumstances UKIP would begin to develop an economic and social strategy favouring those who have lost most from the open borders policy that globalisation has entailed.  Any young, or perhaps not so young, politician wanting to lead a centre-left party would seriously wait to see how UKIP develops, for in a multi-party new Britain UKIP is quite capable of emerging as a centre-left party shorn of much of its right-wing vote siphoned off into Arron Banks’s new venture.