Remember June 23 2016. It's the day Britain stopped being a liberal country

Remember the European passport? The one that Nigel Farage took out of his breast pocket every day and waved about in front of the TV cameras, calling it a “disgrace”? The one that meant you were part of something big?

Well you haven’t got it anymore. And you are part of something small. Stop talking Britain down! That’s what they’ll say. You can hear them now. The fifth biggest economy in the world! We can do it on our own!

Well we did do it on our own. We brokered relationships with our neighbours for our mutual benefit and we have walked away from them in an angry paroxysm of Spitfire nationalism. This is the end of our liberal Britain.

Of course, it is more complicated than that. There is an enlightened case for leaving the European Union. There is a possibility, perhaps of a more prosperous future.

But the chances of finding it out in these panicked days as the markets go crazy, the civil service cannot find even a tenth of the manpower for all the negotiating that must be done, all framed by the bomb that has already gone off under our political leadership? The likelihood of Britain’s future place in the world – half-loathed by its neighbours and virtually ignored by everyone else – arriving at an arrangement less imperfect than the one we have walked away from? It seems slim indeed.

There is a divide in the nation; that much is clear. And the urbanites that have rushed to dismiss their fellow countrymen as xenophobes and racists, and all the rest, will no doubt now be the ones who will speak in pious tones about the wounds that must be healed. But can they be healed?

Outside the Queen Victoria Pub in Marseille, England fans threw chairs across the square and chanted, “F*** off Europe / We’re all voting leave.” At the Basildon count last night, the returning officer could scarcely be heard returning his near 70 per cent result over chants of, “F*** off Brussels! F*** off Brussels!”

Where is the common ground on which these people will unite? This is not a caricature. How does Britain heal itself across fault lines such as these?

On top of the hate that has been deliberately stoked, now, the detested experts warn (and they’ve got it right so far), will come significant financial problems. What will be the consequences, for all those millions of people who have voted to leave the European Union when, in a few months, their mortgage repayments go up more than £100 a month? It is anything but off the cards.

Already the lies are unravelling. The £350m a week for the NHS was a “mistake to promise,” says Nigel Farage. Net migration won’t come down, says Dan Hannan, the MEP who, by his own admission, made it his life’s mission to remove Britain from the EU when he 19 years old, 26 years ago. (That tells you all you need to know about the man’s arguments by the way – slower growth than Antarctica, and so on. They are bespoke for the cause. Meaningless.)

The folk who want their country back have got it back. The ones who never thought for a second that it had gone are reconciling themselves to the fact they have lost it.