If I try to come up with an analogy, I can only think of the 1832 Great Reform Act, which the political class was forced to accept by popular unrest, but which it deliberately framed to thwart the democratic impulse, causing a generation of political unrest.

Part of the responsibility for our post-2016 turbulence certainly rests on the Cameron government, which behaved disgracefully in fomenting “Project Fear” to try to bully the electorate into voting Remain. No less disgraceful was its marshaling of foreign politicians to interfere in our domestic politics by telling us how to vote, with Barack Obama threatening to place us at the back of the queue. A leading Commonwealth politician told me that his country’s prime minister later regretted having been induced by Cameron to oppose Brexit. The least that can be said is that the government’s efforts must have reduced the Leave majority, and this made the result seem inconclusive and encouraged rejection of the result.

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In 1975, when Harold Wilson called a referendum on membership, there was a similar attempt to scare the voters. Then (in the words of the pro-European writer Hugo Young) membership was supported by “all the acceptable faces of British public life,” including Anglican bishops and most of the press, echoing “the golden thread of deceptive reassurance”: membership would make Britain more prosperous but would change nothing that people cared about. But the Labour minister Peter Shore, in a brilliant and impassioned speech at the Oxford Union (well worth watching on YouTube) dismissed the promises of prosperity as hollow, and summed up the argument for European membership as nothing but “Fear, Fear, Fear.” That time fear worked. And however deeply they disagreed, opponents of membership accepted the result as binding for more than a generation.

In contrast, when in 2016 the electorate refused to vote in the way they had been instructed by their betters, students in university towns wept in the streets and Lord Adonis told us that there had been a “nervous breakdown” in the civil service. Even if they had believed ‘Project Fear’, this reaction appears excessive. We were, after all, talking about membership of a trading bloc. It was not like Henry VIII breaking with Rome.

Moreover, as many of us found at the time, convinced Remainers seemed to know little about the EU, and were reluctant to discuss in it any detail. This was later confirmed by an academic study by Adam Fagan and Stijn van Kessel, “The Failure of Remain: Anti-Brexit activism in the United Kingdom.” They found that Remain campaigners had had little positive to say about the EU, no response to worries about sovereignty and immigration and no shared view about Britain’s possible future in the EU. As for wider political views, another academic study by Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley (published by Cambridge University Press) concluded that on crucial matters including immigration, equality, ethnicity and national identity, Remain voters differed little from Leavers.

The Oxford economist Sir Paul Collier summed it up neatly: in the absence of strong positive feelings about the EU, had the British in 2016 been voting on whether they wanted to join the bloc, the answer would surely have been a resounding No. Given that the popularity of the EU across Europe had been in sharp decline for a generation, that would probably have been the result in other countries too. So at least thought President Macron, who told Andrew Marr that the French would probably have chosen to leave – had they been allowed to vote.

So why – to return to my starting point – did 2016 cause such turmoil? Moreover, why are attempts being made by politicians to reverse it even now, when the economic and political case for aligning with and even rejoining the EU is patently weak and likely to cause renewed political disruption?

I can only conclude that the 2016 referendum and its aftermath brought into the open a previously unrecognized fissure in our society. EU membership was about more than a rational calculation of costs and benefits. For an influential Remain minority it encapsulated the post-1980s liberal order to which they were firmly attached, based on globalization, permeable borders and post-democratic government. The conflict of Leave and Remain persisted and deepened after 2016 because the Remain tribe would not allow the Leave tribe to pursue the logical consequences of Brexit and “take back control.” That the EU has long proved ineffective, corrupt and undemocratic is irrelevant for those to whom it symbolizes a cosmopolitan ideal. Hence the present government’s eagerness to spend vast sums on an Erasmus scheme that benefits very few: it’s the thought that counts.

The unresolved struggle ten years after the vote inflames and solidifies our tribal division. Leavers and Remainers are now openly aligned on opposite sides in a range of logically unconnected issues, on which they are unwilling to compromise. Perhaps some such polarization was likely, even inevitable, for we see a similar development across the democratic world.

Nevertheless, those who have opened and widened the fissure in Britain – especially for reasons that were spurious, frivolous or self-interested – have caused long-term damage. For politicians to seek “realignment” and even to talk about rejoining the EU, without balanced public debate and a clear vote, is throwing petrol on the flames, and for transparently party-political reasons.