I marked what some see as my last day as a European by watching the people of Wigan explain why Brexit happened. Leavers intending to proudly wave a Union Jack at 11 pm tonight, should also watch this short film — part of erstwhile music journalist John Harris’s Anywhere but Westminster series of reports for the Guardian. It may change your emotions to something more appropriate — and redirect them to where they’re better needed.

But the film’s target audience, perhaps surprisingly for a famously left-leaning newspaper like the Guardian, is lazily left-leaning Remainers like me; People who should have spent less time decrying Leave voters as idiots and/or bigots and more time finding out why a place like Wigan — decimated by Tory austerity measures — voted 64% in favour of the Tory plan to leave the European Union.

He speaks to people who hate Brexit, those who ardently support it, and to those who barely know it’s happening. Yet the only person featured I’d ever be likely to fall out with or could imagine not having a laugh with is Harris himself. And only because he was once scathing about my favourite Daniel O’Donnell album on BBC2’s Late Review.

One of the interviewees, Charlie, volunteers in a “food recycling” project (Typical of the compassion and delicacy flowing out these interviews, those who run it are careful to call it an environmental exercise rather than an anti-poverty measure) and explains how, after his housing bills are taken care of, he has to live for most of the month on a tenner. Wigan was a Universal Credit pilot area. Charlie lost his job of 18 years, can’t get another one and has suffered from polio since birth. He voted for Brexit and he’d vote for it again.

Harris asks him why he’d do that when Brexit will clearly make the economic situation worse. Charlie’s life is so bad he doesn’t believe it’s possible for things to get worse.

And there you have it. Not one racist epithet. Just utter despair and the need for it to be acknowledged seguing with the conviction that any change must be for the better.

The film is 10 months old but the deal we leave on today is basically the same as Theresa May’s (it just needed “a bit of a character” to finally get it pushed through) so everything said here still applies. Watching it reminds me of, above all else, the recent disturbing, heart-breaking BBC Scotland documentary on poor Gail Porter, the former TV presenter.

She had nowhere to go with her anguish so she self-harmed. She knew cutting her own flesh was damaging her horribly, disfiguring herself permanently, but her need to let out the emotional pain — the desire for any sort of catharsis no matter how dangerous and scarring — was so overpowering she just had to do it.

Her most out-of-control behaviour, like her anorexia, gave her the greatest feeling of control. It was self-destructive but at least it felt like action.

Hearing these people in Wigan, you realise previously smug fat bastards like me, with my PC schtick, apparently blind love of everything foreign (lasagne, sombreros, Balkans genocide), and pitying social media posts, are like Gail Porter’s dad in that documentary; sorry for your hardship but renouncing all responsibility and, ultimately, blaming you for your own sorrow.

Gail’s dad likes a drink himself and has been through a marriage break-up. He thinks he understands. I’m a Union Jack- and Saltire-waving, kebab-loving, pint-quaffing Rangers and Scotland football fanatic from Ardrossan. I think I can relate to these Wigan locals.

But no. Not enough for them anyway. Not nearly enough.

Gail’s got her slightly gaslighty Dad. Wigan’s only alternative to Tory Brexit is openly fascist, separatist parties or a Labour party under an idealogue who’s plainly fetishising your hardship.

So what else are you going to do but jump on the back of a decision to fuck shit up and make everyone in the entire country feel exactly what you’re going through. What else you going to do but slash yourself.

Gove, Cleverly, Francois, and Rees-Mogg. What are they in all this? Gail Porter’s mum? Nah — they’re the fucking razor blades. Them and their type have always been lying around waiting to be used on those in distress.

Johnson, Farage, Aaron Banks et al. They’re the users, the bloody undertakers hoping you hit the vein that’ll let them intervene, take control and turn a profit — all under the sheen of compassion for your loss.

1: Sovereignty was never relinquished. The first line of the withdrawal agreement states this openly.

2: It was the Tory Party who took us INTO Europe 47 years ago.

3: Johnson only led the Leave campaign because he thought it would lose yet give him the proper profile with the Tory Eurosceptics he needed to make him party leader.

4: £350M a week.

5: Every decision the EU took could be vetoed by any member and its every process and vote was shown live on the internet … and it was all borne of hope and co-operation.

6: Leave told us 80 million Turks were coming to Britain. The population of Turkey is 84 million.

7: Ach, if you voted Brexit you stopped listening at 2, if you’re even reading this post at all. You don’t really care about the detail anyway. If you voted Remain, you can do the next dozen arguments against — we both know them inside-out anyway.

It’s not perfect, the EU, but the reasons for leaving at this moment in time are as bogus as any fanfare, flag-waving, or coin-minting around this tragically retrograde socio-economic move are sickening.

You’d struggle to make the Metropolitan Liberal Elite label stick to me. But that I am this upset is the kick in the balls I deserve for ever tempting even one person to think “bloody Remoaner” and harden their Brexiteering resolve.

The question is, why did people do this to themselves? The answer is austerity kicking their right nut and “shut up, you stupid bigot” kicking the left.

All those Second World War films we were raised on seem to make British suffering a British strength and that Boris seems fat and wordy and lovably daft like Churchill. And we all had a knees-up and a sing-song down the bomb shelter during the war. So if any hipster-looking git expresses polysyllabic concern for your circumstances, he’s probably just scared of crowds or mixing with the likes of us. Dismiss him as a snowflake. Boom! Suddenly you feel empowered. And you’re instantly part of a community.

But in 1945 the people of Britain voted Churchill out and Labour in. When we really knew what evil and enmity was — when it wasn’t all just a movie — we seized any chance to ease the consequent suffering.

In 2010–2020 the country was suffering again — the after-effects of the 2008 financial crisis. But somehow the bankers got away with it and, if it wasn’t their fault, well, we lacked an enemy to pin it on and rally against. The media largely told us everything was okay now so we voted to show them it wasn’t. We felt so alienated we wanted to return to the Spirit of the Blitz — so we invented a Blitz.

The jackals seized on this mood and ran with it and exploited it til we were hating a continental body that tries to protect women in the workplace and siding with an American who boasts about assaulting them everywhere and every time he can.

Churchill knew we had to keep the Russians out. Johnson won’t tell us how far he’s let them in.

I’ve been talking about the Orwellian cult of suffering equaling strength. And in another harrowing moment from Harris’s film, he interviews a jolly-sounding couple — barely in their twenties — he bumps into on the very Wigan Pier Orwell wrote about when describing the depression poverty of the 1930s. They’re arguably the happiest adults in the film and those with least knowledge of Brexit. They’re both about to spend the night on the street, warming themselves with only a bottle of vodka. The young man had a landscaping job with his father’s business — his father killed himself a month earlier.

Across the canal, like a moment of crass symbolism from one of his books, The Orwell pub is shut down and boarded up. Another local employer, source of civic pride and place of community celebration, gone.

It was amid the burgeoning of this socio-economic climate that another Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron called the Brexit referendum four years ago. And things got very Orwellian very fast

Even the least politicized mainstream media outlets suddenly, apparently, needed to find “balance” for what was suddenly the argument that the world is not flat. Experts weren’t to be trusted. Facts were just elitism. The BBC saw it as a dereliction of duty not to find a counter-argument — it’s their job to play devil’s advocate, you see. It absolutely wasn’t about creating a rammy for ratings. But if someone is arguing against facts, “balance” translates as giving air time to the deluded and/or the nefarious.

The simplistic, shouty arguments and non-sequitur retorts of the nefarious chimed with those sick of hearing a lot of poncy nuance. Experts and caring-sharing lefty-liberals seemed to always end up patronising and blaming them for their naivety — their crudity. Subtlety and intellectualism had never put food in their mouth — why shouldn’t they listen to Farage and Boris’s unequivocal messages about who was to blame.

I’m a heavy drinker, fast food eater and football obsessive. I’m no “man of the people” but, thanks to obtaining a shit degree at Glasgow University and generally wanting everyone to get along, I’m somehow more of an elitist than the Oxbridge-educated Old Etonian who led us out of the EU, and more of a hypocrite than millionaire hedge-funder Farage, father to two half-German kids and crippled by Brussels regulation on dodgy off-shore tax havens, who has convinced us he wants out of the EU solely so he can smoke in the pubs he never goes to without a pack of photographers in tow.

Look, none of us get all the complexities of a move like Brexit. But all you have to do is look at any MP or journalist actively championing Brexit. They’re all venal and/or messianic. That’s your first clue.

If you’re not sure about the substance of a cause — judge it by the substance of those advocating it. Or, follow the money. There was never any evidence that Brexit would make the country richer and all of history teaches us the first people to suffer in times of recession are the worst off. And the worst off always have most need to believe in revolutions.

But banging on about social psychology and citing half-remembered youTube introductions to The Frankfurt School is not the way. Theodor Adorno absolutely nailed what’s happening right now — right down to the fact the Culture Industry, i.e., social media, has persuaded me to maintain the very system I’m attacking. Facebook, Twitter and every blog I know, like Amazon happily selling you Marx & Engels’ greatest hits (almost as toe-tapping as Daniel O’Donnell’s), feeds off your protest against it like a vampire getting more blood out a panicking heart.

But — hey — the holocaust was Monday’s news story and no-one wants that gloomy stuff on a Friday, eh. People want to be happy — or as close to happy as gloating hatefulness allows. People need community and celebration. The country is getting flags and schadenfreude. And it’s aimed as hand-wringing snowflakes like me. So, for now, a tortured, tenuous, unrelentingly Alan Partridge-esque analogy about self-harm is as far as I’ll go.

The road back has to start somewhere. And it has to be trodden very, very delicately lest we further inflame the need for bulldozer nationalism that brought it about.

Brexit wasn’t a democratic vote. And I don’t mean all the ways Electoral Law and due Parliamentary process have been abused in getting it through. I mean Britain’s decision to leave the EU was, at best, a mass protest but more likely — more accurately — a scream of collective anguish.

The main task now is to find a way of pinning every one of Brexit’s inevitably terrible consequences on the people who brought it about through exploiting the genuine suffering in places like Wigan. We mustn’t let them pin it on people fleeing genocide and risking their lives to work here saving ours.

You only end the self-harm by getting to the real root of the pain. We on the left condescended to and pushed away those who needed us most to the point they found something we loved — something that benefited and protected millions — and trashed it. That’s the failure that got us here, to a place where, as I barely recovered from the first Scottish independence referendum, yet another flag I quite like is being waved in my face as if I hate it.

As the fireworks of schadenfreude go off in Glasgow, I’ll be more careful about how I wave the one I’m left loving most innocently — the blue one with the gold stars.