Brexit postmortem: Healing divisions a challenge for every European country

So, it’s happened. What was unthinkable to the political establishment - and to 16 million UK citizens - a few weeks ago is now the reality in which we find ourselves. As the fog of anger and dismay clears, we have to begin to see a way forward.

We must work hard to protect the free movement of people, goods and services between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. And we will have to redouble our efforts and our vigilance to avoid the provocation of more bloody conflict on the island of Ireland, even as it becomes the frontier between the UK and the EU. The Good Friday Agreement, which has brought so much stability and security to the populations of this island, must not be undermined for the political gain of either side of the sectarian divide.

This is all part of a bigger battle. The UK may have turned its back on the institutional trappings of the EU, but we can still work to salvage the values of openness and tolerance we share and care about. The first step is to move the United Kingdom on from the divided and angry place it is today, to become a more empathetic and more egalitarian nation.

Instead of talking of a London city state, we need urgently to re-examine how funds are distributed from the wealthiest areas of the country to the poorest. It cannot be right to be the fifth (or, now, sixth) largest economy in the world, and yet have Boroughs in which more than half the residents’ children live in poverty. I have seen flats in my own city, where children sleep on the floor because beds have been sold to pay bills, or feed addictions. This cannot go on.

The vast majority of Leave voters were not, and will never be, xenophobes or racists. The fact is that in vast areas of Britain people feel they simply haven’t mattered to the elite bubble in Westminster. For those on the REMAIN side - who have felt so much detachment in these past few days from a country they once knew - a moment’s empathy for those who have felt detached and ignored over the course of decades would not go amiss. For all the talk of second referendums, there is little evidence that those in downtrodden English towns and cities remotely believe they were wrong.

The politics of immigration speak to this point particularly acutely. As an instinctive liberal and internationalist, I incline towards open borders, and the shared macroeconomic prosperity which comes from free trade and free movement. Yet macroeconomic indicators do not always reflect real life experience. As technology has eclipsed manual labour, and open markets have eclipsed established (if sometimes inefficient) working practices, job security and living standards have declined in some communities even as the country’s overall prosperity has grown.

Sadly, we may now also have to accept that to avoid division within national borders - division between rich and poor, young and old, graduate and non-graduate - we will have to countenance some remaking of the concept of European citizenry across those borders. If that is indeed the future, we should seek to reinforce an unfettered right to trade and to travel while revisiting the terms of a right to work and settle. This is a challenge not just for the UK but for every European country, and EU leaders would do well to tackle it head on in the coming negotiations. Ireland has a special interest in doing so, to protect the European relationship with its nearest neighbour, its second largest trading partner (after the US).

Soon the UK will have a new Prime Minister. Their biggest challenge is keeping the hard won peace in Northern Ireland and stopping the UK from disintegrating - constitutionally, by persuading Scotland to remain in the Union; and socially by recognising the need to bring together the two sides of the referendum argument in a cohesive society. Then, and only then, will be able to snatch any solace from what has been a dreadful week in the history of the United Kingdom.

Baroness Doocey is a Lib Dem member of the House of Lords