Britain is in crisis. Doom and gloom are everywhere.
There is a different way of addressing this British crisis. The Treasury needs to be dismantled; economic growth should have its own department. Limits of the central British state needs to be tackled – including its micro-management and over-centralisation. The principle of Scottish and Welsh self-determination needs to be recognised; Northern Ireland’s special status and right to reunify with the South respected.
The left need to talk about England; understand the importance of symbols, flags and emotions, and wake up and realise how abandoned so many people feel. And maybe even dare to talk about class, about working class traditions and pride, and inequality.
This territory cannot be left abandoned and uncontested to the right. Otherwise it will have severe consequences. All around the world are examples of inspiring politics and fightbacks against the right and populism.
There is the Spanish government’s bold moves protecting consumers and challenging Europe’s debt rules, and the Mexican left-wing Presidency is having the courage to stand up to Trump. Political leaders breaking with the insipid mainstream and daring to challenge the right.
There is no ... British left vision: a democratising, egalitarian, republican in the widest sense, project. Not from the left of Labour. Corbyn. The Greens. And there is no equivalent political programme such as a modern-day Charter 88.
But then such is the British polycrisis that the radical imagination requires even more than constitutional tinkering. It requires a project to address the structural issues that 1960s Wilsonism and 1980s Thatcherism failed to change. And alongside this it needs a set of popular stories connected to emotions and hopes which allow people to see a world where things can get better, which counter and defeat Faragism and shape the future.
If this does not happen the future will be defined by the forces of the populist right including those who brought us a hard Brexit and shown no responsibility or remorse. These are high stakes. But clinging to the old norms and the mainstream will not do in UK politics – or in Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.