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There is a law of physics that also applies to politics: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another.

The story of Brexit is a story of energy conversion the work of political engineers who mined a generation of scattered grievances and forged them into a single demand, to leave the European Union. Nobody did this more successfully than Nigel Farage, who transformed an untapped reservoir of xenophobic suspicion into a political force by making the EU synonymous with immigrants.

In the days before the referendum around the time Farage unveiled his infamous breaking point billboard, and a far-right terrorist murdered the Labour MP Jo Cox, there was a vivid sense that this atmospheric energy, present in the air for so many years, had finally taken a new form. For decades, anti-immigrant feeling had been left to grow, unchecked and unchallenged; now it was coupled with a political resentment against an amorphous governing elite, and in a single moment changed the future of the country for ever.

This week, as remainers once again contemplate our defeat, we may reflect on those days after Coxs murder when it felt like there might be a pause for thought, a public recognition of the dark place we were heading. But there was no such moment: the campaigns barely paused, and the entire circus of bile and lies barrelled onwards with a redoubled haste. I remember feeling at the time that there was a steely national insistence that we must refuse to draw the obvious conclusions from the case of a murderer who spent years collecting anti-immigrant propaganda and filing it away neatly in his house in folders.

If you think that was a grotesque failure to stop and confront how this happened, then the years since will provide no solace either. Many people who had lived in the UK for years, or indeed all their lives, reported their first experiences of racist abuse in public. I was one of that number. In 2018, a plot to assassinate another Labour MP, Rosie Cooper, was uncovered. These attitudes did not develop overnight, or even over the span of the EU referendum. Even the pain and frustration caused by austerity are of relatively recent vintage. According to research by Lucy Hu of the University of Pennsylvania: Exclusively economic arguments proved to be a facade for private racist attitudes of many leave voters.

The longer, more corrosive history is that of a right that exploited immigration for cynical ends, and a Labour party that made its own cynical compact with this sentiment, using it, when needed, to show its own toughness against the devious migrant. It was always a myth that New Labour was fundamentally a pro-immigration project; immigrants were welcome as a feature of a pro-globalisation view. High-skilled migrants, who came in on a points-based system, were the most desirable; asylum seekers, after some initial promises, were quickly ditched.

Much of the hostile environment infrastructure of immigration controls that exists today is the legacy of Labours last government. The tier system that sorts immigrants according to their value to the UK, the high barriers to gaining citizenship and the conversion of employers into border guards were all policies established by Labour in 2006.

But it was the way that politicians talked about immigration, or rather didnt talk, that allowed this resentment to congeal, ready to be shaped into an explosive. The years before the financial crisis saw increased asylum applications from conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. And between a governing party eager not to look like it was too soft on claimants and a rightwing media that tapped into the rich vein of scaremongering about migrants, the tone was fixed. The presence of immigrants was now a matter of legitimate concern; there was a need to look out for the indigenous population, in the words of Labours immigration minister Phil Woolas. By the time Gordon Brown was on the ropes trying to save his premiership, it was British jobs for British workers, the progenitor of Ed Milibands dismal controls on immigration crockery.

All that energy had to go somewhere. In politics, everything is connected: liberals cannot pick and choose when they care about immigrants. Britain went into the Brexit referendum hobbled by a financial crisis and a decade of austerity, many of its communities badly damaged by deindustrialisation. There were no quick answers to any of this, and so the pain was shifted on to an immediate, intimate enemy, easily purged: the immigrant, and all the immigrant represented, be it the enabling EU, the elected elite, the lawyers or the judges.

Perhaps we could not have predicted how and when this would happen but we allowed it to happen. Liberals across parties who are horrified by the consequences of Brexit must realise that they were defeated by an epic national scapegoating project one whose power needed to have been checked long before. That is how to understand Brexit: not an irrational rightwing populism, not a derangement of post-truth politics, but the predictable outcome of a concerted political and media campaign that capitalised on a colossal failure of our economic model.

Just as I did in the days after the murder of Jo Cox, I have searched for signs of this epiphany since the Brexit vote. I have looked for it among Conservatives, naively bewildered by the thuggishness that has captured their party. I have looked for it in Labour under Corbyn and Labour under Starmer. And I have looked for it, in the past few days, in the belated mea culpas of those enraged that all the calamities of a Brexit blunder may finally be upon us. I have not found it. Which means that all that we love will be wrecked, again and again, by an energy that shifts the blame for our national failures from our leaders on to anyone who is not indigenous. If you think that energy is gone because our borders are closing and we have taken back control, think again. It is simply changing form.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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For liberals, Brexit is a hard lesson in the politics of resentment - The Guardian