Brexiters are often accused of living in the past. That is manifest in the now recurring Brexiter response to concerns about Brexit: ‘but we did perfectly well before’.

What happens in the next three months, perhaps even the next couple of weeks, is going to shape the fate of the country for decades. If Brexit goes ahead, in any form, it will enact a profound misreading of the nature of the contemporary political and economic world and represent an unprecedented failure of British statecraft.