had undermined the British Union by offering the Scots a largely costless path to independence: almost everything which the Act of Union guaranteed to Scotland as an economy integrated with England was equally guaranteed to it by the European Union (the exception might be an integrated currency, but as we saw in the Scottish referendum that is a debatable issue). The SNP realised this in the mid-1980s, and its dramatic change of policy on the Common Market (to which before then it had been deeply hostile) was the prelude to its electoral success. But Scottish independence was only costless in this fashion if both countries remained in the EU: even if an independent Scotland could remain in the EU after England had left, something the SNP leaders oftenfantasise about, the costs of disunion for the Scots would escalate dramatically, both economically and psychically. So Brexit, I claimed, was likely to stall the movement towards independence in Scotland.

The second reason that I thought Brexit would help the Left was more fundamental. It was that the essential character of the EU, as Wolfgang Streeck has powerfully argued, is hostile to traditional socialism of the mid-twentieth-century variety. (It is, incidentally, testimony to the remarkably impoverished nature of the British debate on the EU that it has failed to generate any analysis of comparable seriousness and sophistication to that found on the Continent, particularly – I would say – in the writings of Streeck, Habermas and Varoufakis, except perhaps in the work of Chris Bickerton at Cambridge). If Britain