"How would you like your Brexit , hard or soft? Or would you prefer it a bit squidgy in the middle but firm on the outside? You'll leave that to the chef. Okay. But with it you would like a single market with no migrants? Sorry, if you look at the menu you'll see we can't separate them, it's all part of the same dish you see. Well, you can try, but you'll find it hard to find other markets round here at this time. You're going to try the Aussie place down the road? It's actually a really long way from here. Oh, you know that but you like the way they handle the migrants!"

It seems that, on a vote that was won by less than 3.8% on a turn-out of 72.2% forty three years of carefully constructed integration with our European neighbours is now going to be hurriedly and irrevocably dismantled by just three  appointed politicians - David Davis, Liam Fox (yes, he of both the MP's expenses scandal and the scandal leading to his resignation over a too close relationship with his 'friend' Adam Werrity who accompanied him on ministerial trips abroad) and Boris Johnson, about whom nothing more needs to be said. Parliament will be completely side-stepped in terms of scrutiny or agreement on what is negotiated. So we've got our country back! This is how we do things. No debate, no democratic involvement in the process of dissolution or its effects on us or our institutions. The referendum was a simple - indeed ridiculously over-simplified - question. Do you want to leave the European Community? Yes or No. Not a mention of terms or conditions, let alone potential consequences. No minimum threshold for effecting the biggest constitutional change since we joined the EU, a change that will profoundly affect not just us, but all succeeding generations. Only absurd - and now demonstrably false - promises by the Leavers of untold wealth for the NHS and that we'd "have our country back". From whom, exactly, and back to whom was never divulged. Certainly this outbreak of a curiously English kind of metaphysical revanchism  has given further impetus to the break-up of the British Union if not the European one, since Scotland and Northern Ireland were firmly in the Remain camp and another Scottish independence referendum will surely follow shortly.
  
This disastrous state of affairs lies firmly at the feet of one David Cameron who, with a mixture of public-school hubris and political stupidity, saw this as a terrific wheeze to get him a majority government and to finally see off the Eurosceptic wing of his party with not a thought for the possibility of losing the promised vote (Etonians don't lose) and thus offering no safeguards to be built into the voting process. Despite this,the British media and the Labour parliamentary party, chose not to blame the architect of this debacle, but instead the advocate of Remain, one Jeremy Corbyn, as the obvious culprit! Apparently he was not sufficiently ardent in his advocacy for the Remain cause and must thus take the rap for the whole thing 
As usual Mr. Corbyn showed a political honesty completely absent from the mainstream political discourse with which we are all too familiar. He has - like many people on the left - never been a wholehearted enthusiast for the European Union, being only too aware that it is too much in the grip of the IMF and the forces of international capital. He has noted what happened to Italy (Mario Monti, unelected and brought in to push through an austerity programme), Greece (the crushing of Syriza) and the pressure put upon Spain when they challenged the austerity agenda. Nonetheless, he knows it is all we have as a supranational institution, and is worth defending whilst pushing for greater democratisation of it as an institution. This wholly rational position was not enough to deflect the tirade of opprobrium heaped upon him by the corporate media, including, of course, the BBC and, most egregiously, 'The Guardian', who continue to run almost daily assaults on his every action. The combined force of the mass media are increasingly resembling the pig Squealer in 'Animal Farm', the propagandist of the powerful, desperately blaming all our woes on the Machiavellian cunning of this devious Labour leader (who has even managed to become elected twice with overwhelming majorities). They defend and justify the greed and acquisitiveness of the elite as they enrich themselves to an obscene degree, the consequent rise in poverty, the impoverishment and collapse of our public services as necessary and the only sensible way to manage our affairs. The media's role in reinforcing an ideology that maintains inequality and, more importantly, in accommodating the rest of us to it, is ever more obvious. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony will realise the validity of his work.  Plus ca change. 

In 1961, a very real change was about to happen in my life. I walked the one and a half miles to my new Secondary school alone on the first day, full of foreboding and worried about what was about to happen to me. My new school uniform, with its large silk-threaded silver, green and yellow badge and my newly polished shoes gleaming mockingly in the brightness of early morning, seemed to symbolise my loss of self, my sense that I was about to be initiated into something I neither understood nor wanted. My path took me alongside the golf course where I used to scrounge lost golf balls to re-sell to the golfers. I looked through the wire mesh fence and dearly wanted to climb through and disappear down one of the drainage tunnels I have described elsewhere, alone in the darkness and safe. But I was now shut out of my old life. I trudged on alongside a small estate of prefabs, a last remnant of world war two, built to accommodate returning soldiers in 1945. Each one was surrounded by a neatly tended garden and all were painted bright pastel colours reflecting both the morning sunshine and the pride of the owners and taunting my own increasing gloom. I reached the busy main road, and waited for a break in the traffic that would allow me to dash across. When the moment came, I hurried over to the other side clutching my jumble sale satchel, the only thing that undermined my transformed appearance, and, once across, with the cars resuming their unending flow knew that I had now arrived at a new and utterly unfamiliar place. 

I walked up the long drive of the school, lined with tall hedges, and now filled with boys of all ages, most laughing and chattering to each other but all wearing the same depressing clothing as myself. I entered the main building through the large glass doors into the foyer where I had waited for my interview some months before. There were several large flip charts on easels with alphabetical lists of names of the new intake, and I found my own name on the last one and next to it the number of my new form room with the name of the teacher I had to report to. But where was it? Boys were scurrying off in all directions, but I hadn't a clue where to go to find my tutor room and I was too intimidated to ask anyone. I noticed a group of much older boys - actually they seemed to me fully grown men who had mysteriously chosen to dress as children like myself. These all had one or two silk stripes sewn around their wrists in the style of military uniforms, and they were chatting together and occasionally casting an eye on the thinning throng of newcomers. Eventually there was only me remaining, shifting anxiously from one leg to the other and wondering whether to just do a runner and have done. One of the uniformed men detached himself from the group and made his way over to me. "Where do you have to go to?" he said wearily. I looked up at him, but couldn't speak, so pointed to my name on the flip chart. He shook his head. "Down there", he pointed to a corridor, "up the first set of stairs to the top. I assume you can read numbers. They're on the doors." He turned his back and wandered back to his group of friends. He said something and they laughed. It was only when I got to the start of the corridor that I saw there were signs indicating the room numbers in each one.

I was the last to enter the classroom and I was relieved to see Keith was in the same class, but he had already claimed a desk and the one next to his was occupied. In fact there was only one vacant desk left, so I placed my satchel on top of it and lowered myself next to a boy I had, of course, never seen before. I opened the lid of my desk and peered inside. I don't know what I expected, but it was empty. I looked around the room. It was only then that I noticed the teacher was already at his desk at the front and was staring at me as I arranged myself in my new seat. He was a tall man with a black moustache, wearing a dark blue corduroy jacket and leaning backwards in his office chair sucking pointlessly at a large unlit pipe, an ostentatiously curved pipe with a carved amber bowl. He removed this and pointed it at me. "Good of you to turn up", he said, "now you know where we are I'll expect you on time in future. You understand?" I nodded. If this was to be my future, I desperately wanted to return to the past. But this was not an option.During the morning I was issued with a time-table indicating that my learning was now divided into many separate subjects, all taught by different teachers. Most of the subjects I recognised - English, Maths, History, Geography, Art, but there were new ones as well. French, okay, but Woodwork? Metalwork? Technical Drawing? I hadn't fully comprehended the implications of a technical education. I had no idea what these were and I felt a bit alarmed. Everything about this new institution that would now dominate my life felt disorienting. I just felt hopelessly out of place and longed for something familiar. 
At break I looked among the hundreds of black-blazored boys in the playground for Keith, and eventually saw him on the other side of the playground. He was standing with a group of other kids from our tutor group, all avidly discussing the morning's events. I didn't feel able to simply walk over and join in, since I only knew Keith, and wasn't sure how I might be received. So I walked around the perimeter of the tarmaced area with its high wire fencing and I was reminded of when I was let out to play in the isolation hospital all those years ago. Though the playground was full of boys, it felt just as empty.