Will the ultra-Remainers keep it up as long as the Jacobites?

First, the good news. Both the President of the European Council Donald Tusk and the UK’s Prime Minister Theresa May have handled the potentially problematic events of the last few days well. Tusk not only spoke clearly on behalf of the 27 remaining members of the EU. He created guidelines for the negotiations that are anything but punitive and captured the poignant sense of loss that the EU’s more sensible advocates feel about the UK sending in its letter of resignation. “Missing you already,” he said. “Thank you and goodbye.” Stop! I’m going to blub.

(Pause)

Right. For her part, May got the tone spot on. There was typical squeamishness from some critics about the decision to mention that there is more to this than trade. Britain is rubbish and it has no cards – none – so must just get ready to be obliterated and squashed, seems to be the ultra-Remainer line.

Hold on, what about security and intelligence? To say nothing of the central role the City of London plays in making the eurozone debt machine go round? A leaked report by Germany’s finance ministry obtained by Handelsbatt this week expressed concern that no deal would result in “grave economic and systemic consequences” for the financial system and Europe’s economies. When this reality is mentioned those who say we have no cards instantly start shouting that the UK is resorting to blackmail.

We’re either powerless or not. We either have cards, or we don’t. It is almost as though some extremist ultra-Remainers are willing failure at every turn and see everything in the worst possible light for the UK…

Meanwhile, the UK government can regard this as having been a successful week. The EU has been reminded of the UK’s important role on defence and security. The UK is now stressing politely, via the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary, that security is not a bargaining chip. Goodness me, no.

The valid point has been made and as a result both sides enter the talks hopefully understanding each other a little better.

Now for the less good news.

It is always hard to measure the standard of public debate and the babble of conversation in the social media bubble has made it even more difficult. Twitter is a daft echo chamber that suits the sarcasm and irreverence of journalists. It creates the conditions for the online equivalent of the good-natured discussion and argument, at an old Fleet Street bar, sometimes turning nasty. My impression, perhaps wrong, is that this has turned even nastier. The media and political conversation about Brexit and what comes next has become deeply dysfunctional in a sustained and wearying manner.

Get out of the bubble, then. Well, I do. Journalists have families and friends too. There too the Brexit conversation looks stuck, with ultra-Remainers, hardline Brexiteers, and moderate Leavers (bewildered that there hasn’t been a coming together), too often shouting at each other. Everyone else looks on faintly annoyed or tries to ignore it.

The former New Labour spindoctor Alastair Campbell said this week that he has never known the country more divided. Even more than after Iraq? See there I go again. Bringing up Tony Blair and the Iraq War. Such regrettable snark, the default position of much media down the ages, is now the hallmark of social media on politics on all sides. I’m as bad as anyone.

But that national division Campbell describes is not 50-50, though. Two pieces of highly significant polling were published this week that should give both sides in the argument pause for thought.

In Scotland, polling showed that Scottish voters, far from clamouring for a separate Scottish Brexit deal, want in overwhelming numbers a UK-wide deal. The premise of the leadership group around First Minister Nicola Sturgeon that Brexit would power their party to independence looks premature at least and a humiliating flop at most.

This is not a licence for the UK government to pay no regard to Scottish feeling, simply a reminder again that the SNP leadership and what it says is not the same thing as Scotland. The goodwill should also be used for a proper conversation about how Britain might be rebalanced post-Brexit, with more focus on the other cities and a less London-centric approach all round.

Even more significantly, a UK-wide YouGov poll published this week showed that voters want Brexit to go ahead, by 69% to 21%, with 44% saying they support Brexit and another 25% saying that although they did not vote for it they think the government has a duty to get on with leaving.

Why then is this proving so divisive? It is not just that Brexit will be complex, and it will be. The real explanation for the spilling over of anger, I suspect, lies in a giant shift in our politics connected to the end of Empire and Britain’s search for a new role.

This goes back to several decades of crisis, beginning with the scandal and failure of Suez, then on to the debate on Europe in the Tories in the 1960s and 1970s and to the stirring of the Scottish home rule movement and nationalism. What was Britain and what was its proper role?

The British state’s constitutional history was lionised by Whig historians, but it was never neatly formulated. The unique struggle over Ireland illustrates that. There was also a long fight about the franchise. A campaign by women for equal treatment and shared ownership of the democratic system won victories, not least of which was securing the right to vote. Contemporary campaigners stress that this work is unfinished.

But in England, Wales and Scotland it is remarkable that the essential constitutional framework, the foundations and building blocks, were accepted by most in the major parties and beyond, as much as we can know before polling. Revolutionary socialism had its advocates, but the mutating two party system and constitutional development constrained extremists. A unitary state and parliament, with a constitutional monarchy, and assorted quirks owing to history, produced a settlement that seems to have enjoyed widespread support. If it works, don’t fix it. This was the approach adopted by early Labour governments, who left the constitution largely alone. The earlier Liberal fix of the House of Lords was bitterly contested.

Instead, the dividing lines were primarily associated with class and arguments about economic power and progress. After the Second World War, all this started to break apart as we looked for a new post-imperial role and questions of identity came to the fore. This led the UK to join the EU, placing an authority above parliament for the first time since the Reformation Simultaneously, the left – having been it seemed defeated on economics – identified the constitution as an alternative route to change and transformation, and also as a way to respond to growing nationalist sentiment in Scotland.

In a quarter of a century the UK passed a lot of power up, down and out, simultaneously, although not enough to the rest of England. In the tumult, identity politics that had been stirred flourished. I’ll never forget standing at Wembley as a Scotland fan in Euro 96 and seeing, yes, that Gascoigne goal and for the first time a forest of England Cross of St George flags.

These are fundamental fissures. These are arguments about identity, about who we are or who we perceive ourselves to be and where we sit in relation to others, so they provoke stronger feelings than conventional current affairs or arguments about transport policy. In journalism it cuts across traditional impartiality too. Reporters and columnists are citizens too, caught up in the turmoil.

Precisely because the cause of the split on the EU is about identity and so fundamental, it seems unlikely that it will, as some of us moderate Leavers and moderate Remainers hoped, heal easily or be replaced with a great national effort to make it a success.

The ultra-Remainer minority want to return to the old order rejected by the majority and now barely even bother to say they accept the result. A third of the country is unreconciled and unreconcilable, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. It all sounds like a less martial equivalent of the Jacobites who refused to accept the 1688-89 settlement, and who then spent 57 years fighting it.

This obviously hardens the hearts of pro-Brexit people. It is astonishing to see the glee with which sticking points are paraded around by prominent ultra-Remainers. Do they really love the EU – a relatively new political project with such a mixed record – so much that they now want Britain to fail?

Still, perhaps it is worth trying – is it? – to take a more generous view and to look for points of agreement and understanding. As Ed West wrote on The Spectator site this week, some of us Brexiteers are surprised by how European we feel post-referendum. I know just what he means. We should outside the EU try harder to speak more languages, make better friends with the Germans and celebrate their peerless culture as we did before the Kaiser ballsed it up, foster links with the rest of the 27, travel more, connect with the Commonwealth but be humble about it, don’t assume everyone loves us, have an honest reckoning with our history, and be open when we can be to the rest of the world.

We are leaving the EU, not Europe. That’s the point. But the starting point is non-negotiable. Britain voted to leave the EU. Britain is leaving the EU.