Over the past year the UK has gone from a latent to an all to obvious stage of DPVID, or Delayed Post-Victory Identity Disorder, and is now well into the fits which characterise this condition. While the fits last it is pretty unlikely that any meaningful self-diagnosis and subsequent deep healing will begin.

70 years ago the British government decided that as a precursor to the end of the British Raj in India its empire in the region should be partitioned, in part giving in to strong nationalist pressures by Indian and Pakistani politicians of the time. The event, including the hardship it placed on the many millions of people subject to the throes of one of the greatest displacements of people in the world, was a defining moment for the development of modern Britain as a country.

The end of the Raj made it clear that the assumption of a right and capacity to determine global dynamics which underpinned Britain’s sense of entitlement to Empire had become very hollow. Despite all the resources of the Empire Britain may not have been able to overcome Nazi Germany on its own. The ‘Lend and Lease’ agreements helped the Americans to begin make an important contribution to the fight against totalitarianism in Germany and continental Europe at the time even before entering the war formally. But even more ‘Lend and Lease’ helped Britain and its Empire to just about survive, and eventually come out as a key victor of World War II. Yet at the end of the war, and the end of being propped up by the USA, the cracks in Britain’s claim to its Empire became wide and visible.

Leaving India quickly but with the semblance of the time and conditions being chosen by Britain became an unavoidable necessity to preserve any kind of credibility, but it could not stop the next steps. Once the process had started the UK was to lose virtually all its colonies over the next 15 years. Like the failure to foresee and manage the human impact of the partition of India, the process of decolonisation in most parts of the world showed how limited Britain’s power had become over process and outcome of global politics.

This should have forced a deep reflection on Britain’s changing place in the world. However, very legitimately on its own, most of the ‘winds of change’ discourse on end of Empire and decolonisation focused on the birth and future of new independent members of the world community, their rights, prospects of development, and how to somehow keep them in association with the UK as part of the Commonwealth.

The other side of the coin, the question of a future national identity for a Britain at ease with itself at home, and maybe especially for England, remained a much more unlaboured field. This is not to say that important points of inflection remained without impact, such as the financial crisis of 1976 and the winter of discontent in 1978/79 which marked the UK’s economic decline, the Brixton race riot in the early 80s, the miners’ strike and the Struggles in Northern Ireland. In different ways these all illustrate the challenges of UK and Westminster politics to cope with the growing assertion of differences in identity, of their validity as part of modern Britain, and the demands of more fairly sharing and re-distributing the income of what remains a wealthy nation.

The politics of muddling through, taking on one public protest challenge at a time and appeasing those most aggrieved, has failed then, and has continued to fail until right now. Few lessons have been learnt and the UK is a fundamentally fragile country, fragile in its economy, fragile in its political unity, and fragile in its social cohesion. The BREXIT vote was an expression of the discontent about Britain never having fundamentally shifted its political ways of working, its politics of class and privilege, and addressing inequalities. It could even be argued that most of Tory politics under Thatcher, Cameron and May, as well as key politics of New Labour deepened the divides even further, silencing and burying the weakest in society as rejects, who could not or would not for their own fault work to the idea of merit based economic success.

Yet while there is visible criticism of the problematic social and political equality record current and past governments, no party in power seems interested in opening up the space of debate about what would make Britain a happier country at peace with itself. Opportunities to push for a deeper reflection of Britain’s role in the past, today, and in the future, such as the current 70 year anniversary of the partition of India are not taken up. The limited footprint of this opportunity as well as others in mainstream British media shows this.

Instead there is awkward fascination with the jockeying for power within and between parties, and the show of continued confusion of the government about how to achieve the much vaunted future benefits of BREXIT. All this creates a fog which is welcome to those who wish to avoid hard questions whether there are in fact true benefits of BREXIT, or not, where the hard consequences of BREXIT will fall in society, and what would be alternatives to this pathway which take stock of the realities of a multi-cultural and diverse Britain in an interconnected world where little can be achieved by any country, powerful or powerless, on its own.

True leadership would involve a government calling a timeout on the BREXIT process, even if one wanted to maintain the fundamental direction of leaving the political structures of the EU, and create the spaces for a broader national discussion about where Britain would like to see itself in the future in the world. Rehashing the emotions of past grandeur will fail the country today, as it did then.