Today we leave the EU, but the progressive European future we crave isn’t dead yet

If one goal is returning to the European Union – and for many of us it certainly is – that will take years and a radical shift on both sides

The seed of this self-mutilation was sown in the war that generated the myth of eternal national superiority. So it feels as fitting as it is brazenly predictable to dwell on a Winston Churchill quote in this dark hour.

If doing so makes me sound like a liberal-left fairground mirror image of Mark Francois or Peter Bone, so be it. One tiny consolation is that the ultras will be as bereft today as those who marched for the chance to reverse the referendum and signed the petition to revoke Article 50.

For the 48 per cent, the battle is lost and there is no glib sugarcoating that poison pill. But it need not be fatal. The fight for a more just and egalitarian European future goes on. As Churchill told his cabinet in 1940, when under huge pressure to do a deal with Hitler: “Nations that go down fighting rise again, but those who surrender tamely are finished.”