We wrote the majority of this book in 2015. Our project was at an end by the time the nation went to the polls in June 2016 to vote on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union. Roughly 52% of those who voted wanted to bring Britain’s membership to an end. More than 33.5 million people voted in the referendum, and almost 17.5 million people voted to leave. Most columnists, commentators, pundits and broadcasters – and the enlightened liberals who dominate our academic institutions – were shocked by the result. They just could not understand how and why so many voters had been persuaded by the fearmongering of the Leave campaign. How could voters place their trust in Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove? These men represented the elite, and they were committed to ensuring the continued dominance of capital over human life. Couldn’t people see this? How could so many voters fall for the absurd claims the elite made about the economic benefits of leaving? Didn’t these voters find the Leave campaign’s blatant demonisation of immigrants distasteful? Didn’t they know that the EU generally benefits Britain’s economy, and that a vote to leave the EU was a vote for economic uncertainty and a reduction in living standards for the majority?

The economy did indeed enter a period of crisis immediately after the result was announced. As we write these words the road ahead remains uncertain. The great fear of ongoing economic turmoil – a fear lodged permanently in the British psyche after almost 40 years of neoliberalism – now frames the pious soul-saving of those whose job it is to promote a progressive liberal worldview that seeks, but hopelessly fails, to mitigate the social, economic, cultural and personal disasters free market capitalism has wreaked on the western world.

It quickly became clear that many of those who occupy the nation’s dead and decaying deindustrialised zones had voted to leave. This prompted the beautiful souls of the metropole to begin their own process of demonisation. The atavistic white working class were too stupid to recognise their own economic best interests, and they seemed to be dedicated to the task of tearing down all the towering achievements of multiculturalism.