To be fair Wales can't take the moral high ground either, as they voted Leave too (except bigger places like Cardiff).

I don't like the divisions either, I don't like the idea of the union splitting (sorry Drew) but I can completely understand why Scotland and NI in particular would want to be rid of the poisonous politics of Westminster. It's the English that keep voting Tory, inflicting that government on the other nations of the union whether they want it or not. I went out the morning after the GE and could hardly bear to look at anyone I met, on the basis that the majority of them decided to vote for the politics of selfishness and greed, xenophobia and insularity. I wanted to scream, or smash something, or maybe just run away and hide.

In a way the EU Referendum result a year later shouldn't have been a surprise, as the signs of what kind of country England wants to be were already plainly there.

I live in a reasonably affluent town, on the edge of the Tory heartlands of the rural Cotswolds. But the signs of poverty are still to be seen, the massive take-up of food banks, the rough sleepers in the doorways, the increasingly normalized unpleasantness to immigrants.

I hope that the English will wake up from their sleepwalking to the one-party state they have been creating over the last decade, and remember that we live in a rich country that can afford to support the poor and the needy, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves as long as "I'm all right". That, sadly, is the England I see all around me now, and I'm afraid I don't like it one bit.