1. The geography reflects the economic crisis of the 1970s, not the 2010s. It became clear early on in the night that Leave had extraordinary levels of support in the North East, taking 70% of the votes in Hartlepool and 61% in Sunderland. It subsequently emerged that Wales had voted for Leave overall, especially strongly in the South around areas such as Newport. It is easy to focus on the recent history of Tory-led austerity when analysing this [...]

But consider the longer history of these regions as well. They are well-recognised as Labour's historic heartlands, sitting on coalfields and/or around ship-building cities. Indeed, outside of London and Scotland, they were amongst the only blobs of Labour red on the 2015 electoral map [...] Thatcherism gutted them with pit-closures and monetarism, but generated no private sector jobs to fill the space. The entrepreneurial investment that neoliberals always believe is just around the corner never materialised ....

2. Handouts don't produce gratitude. By the same token, it seems unlikely that those in these regions (or Cornwall or other economically peripheral spaces) would feel `grateful' to the EU for subsidies. Knowing that your business, farm, family or region is dependent on the beneficence of wealthy liberals is unlikely to be a recipe for satisfaction (see James Meek's recent essay in the London Review of Books on Europhobic farmers who receive vast subsidies from the EU). More bizarrely, it has since emerged that regions with the closest economic ties to the EU in general (and not just of the subsidised variety) were most likely to vote Leave ....

3. Brexit was not fuelled by a vision of the future .... many Leavers believed that withdrawing from the EU wouldn't really change things one way or the other, but they still wanted to do it [...]

Thatcher and Reagan rode to power by promising a brighter future, which never quite materialised other than for a minority with access to elite education and capital assets. The contemporary populist promise to make Britain or American `great again' is not made in the same way. It is not a pledge or a policy platform; it's not to be measured in terms of results. When made by the likes of Boris Johnson, it's not even clear if it's meant seriously or not. It's more an offer of a collective real-time halucination, that can be indulged in like a video game ....

4. We now live in the age of data, not facts .... The attempt to reduce politics to a utilitarian science (most often, to neo-classical economics) eventually backfires, once the science in question then starts to become politicised. `Evidence-based policy' is now far too long in the tooth to be treated entirely credulously, and people tacitly understand that it often involves a lot of `policy-based evidence'. When the Remain camp appealed to their `facts', forecasts, and models, they hoped that these would be judged as outside of the fray of politics. More absurdly, they seemed to imagine that the opinions of bodies such as the IMF might be viewed as `independent'. Unfortunately, economics has been such a crucial prop for political authority over the past 35 years that it is now anything but outside of the fray of politics ....

5. The least `enslaved' nation in the EU just threw off its `shackles'. If the EU worked well for any nation in Europe, it was the UK. Thanks to the scepticism and paranoia of Gordon Brown, Britain dodged the catastrophic error of the single currency. As a result, it has been relatively free to pursue the fiscal policies that it deems socially and politically desirable. The fact that it has consistently chosen neoliberal ones is not really the fault of the EU, the stability and growth pact notwithstanding. But in contrast to southern European members of the EU, Britain is scarcely constrained at all. Instead, it has benefited from economic stability, a clear international regulatory framework and a sense of cultural fraternity with other member states. One could even argue that, being in the EU but outside of the Eurozone, Britain has had the best deal of any member state during the 21st century.