“Every industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life … This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes.”

"If remain had won, we would already have returned to pretending that everything was carrying on just fine. Those people who have been forgotten would have stayed forgotten; those communities that have been abandoned would have stayed invisible to all but those who live in them. To insist that they will now suffer most ignores the fact that unless something had changed, they were going to suffer anyway. Those on the remain side who felt they didn’t recognise their own country when they woke up on Friday morning must spare a thought for the pensioner in Redcar or Wolverhampton who has been waking up every morning for the last 30 years, watching factories close and businesses move while the council cuts back services and foreigners arrive, wondering where their world has gone to.

Leaving the EU does not diminish the power of the multinationals that moved manufacturing jobs overseas, or the financiers whose recklessness led to the closure of libraries and the shrinking of disability benefits. We have not opted out of global capitalism. Something will now be done about the free movement of labour – but capital will still have the run of the place."

When I use the word "crimes" in my comments I mean it. Here is some of the forensic:

A disaster decades in the making