In praise of walls

After the verdict of the referendum had been announced, the most interesting comment was delivered by Nigel Farage. The vote had represented not only a victory against an undemocratic and faceless bureaucracy in Brussels but ‘against the big merchant banks and big businesses’.

Worryingly, neither the majority of the Brexiteers nor their Remainer counterparts – at least among the political and journalistic classes – have grasped what the former Ukip leader understood instinctively; that Brexit is in fact a sub-plot in a much larger, overarching narrative: the battle between international finance and the one force that can realistically check its relentless and apocalyptic march – the nation state.

Understand this and we understand the recurrence of similar historical trends that occurred from the end of the 19th century to the outset of the Second World War as well as alignments which on a superficial analysis seem so unsettling: Nigel Farage and George Galloway, the economist Steve Keen, commentators such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and further afield those like Marine Le Pen – the strangest of bedfellows.