To understand why Britain became Brexitland, you need to look at it not as a single event, but as part of an ongoing cultural war between increasingly entrenched movements in our society. The evolution of this struggle between ‘identity liberals’ and ‘identity conservatives’ over decades has now become the defining fault line in our politics, and will be central to future battles, replacing historic party affiliations linked to class background or income. This is the message from a thought-provoking new work by the University of Manchester political scientists Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford. If this was a retelling of Animal Farm, the pigs, cows and hens would have risen up against Mr Jones, not in reaction to bullying and exploitation, but because of his patronising manner and plan to replace them with imported alpacas and a production centre for vegan ready meals.

Politicians argue about the direction of the country, later historians argue about why they made those decisions, but in Brexitland, Sobolewska and Ford base their analysis on two indisputable facts that make Britain a different place now than it was fifty years ago. These are ‘the transformational processes of university expansion and rising ethnic diversity driven by mass immigration.’

In Brexitland the liberals are university educated, embrace multiculturalism, globalist in outlook and more likely to have …