The Alternative Guide to the EU Referendum: A progressive response to the Leave result

How soon the UK will withdraw its representation from a European Union it no longer supports has yet to be determined. Photograph: Espace Leopold in Brussels from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

With the painfully, aggressively, nationalist suggestion that 'without a bullet being fired' the United Kingdom had declared its 'independence', Nigel Farage claimed victory for the Leave campaign at 4am. Tactless as ever, the UKIP frontman put in his claim early to define the Leave campaign's victory. It is important now that progressives and moderates do not allow this outcome to be defined purely in his or his party's terms.

The Left has to avoid ceding control over events. For instance, immigration looks like having been the dominant factor, trumping the economy at the last. Social tensions, that saw tolerance failing amongst financial struggles and their attendant fears, are clearly present in communities that have been unable to diffuse them with integration.

Progressives can't be sucked into acquiescence to the popular narrative that wants to take the easy road and blame immigrants alone for these stresses and pressures. Progressive policy has to be to heal divisions and to keep making the argument for public investment - in services, in housing, in jobs - as the real solution to the UK's difficulties.

And yet exiting the EU looks likely to drive more wedges between the people of Britain before it heals them. Not least does it raise the spectre of another Scottish Independence Referendum. Nicola Sturgeon was emphatic that Scotland had voted comprehensively for a future in the European Union - in dramatic contrast with England. There has even been a call from Sinn Fein to respect Northern Ireland's pro-European position with a referendum on Irish Unification.

With the result split 52%-48% in the UK as a whole, with Scotland and Northern Ireland moving toward the EU, and England and Wales away, there is as much of a macro divide in the UK as there are regional and local divides. Those divides will not be helped if the British economy takes a further tumble thanks to the isolation of exit.

The European Union itself will also likely suffer for this result as well. The Far Right has already made gains, making strong showings in France, Austria, Poland and Hungary. That sense of Nationalism will only likely be inflamed by 'Brexit' in the elections in European countries over the next couple of years.

What this result cannot do is end the progressive commitment to an internationalist vision of the world. The future for progressives, and the solutions to many of the biggest problems - on the environment, on corporate tax dodging, on managing international debt - remain international.

But maintaining an international view now comes with the much more difficult job of getting to work on building a new pan-European democratic movement, to fill the hole left by the British exit. A key part of that will be going back to the start to make the arguments, from the ground up, that expose the real and dangerous flaws in insular, nationalist and intolerant thinking.

Only by working from the ground up now can progressives break through and begin to change minds. Only from the ground up can progressives unpick the hostility towards Europe, and the false beliefs underpinning it, that prevents us from seeing our commonality, our common values and challenges, and what we can accomplish together.