James O'Nions

Last year, a group of Global Justice Now activists went to Barcelona to see how movements for food sovereignty, energy democracy and housing rights had created significant infrastructure and fed into the historic win by Barcelona En Comú (Barcelona in Common) in the city council elections the previous year.

Many people voted to leave the EU because they were fed up of the effects of an economic system which generates growing inequality, and of a political elite which has left their communities to rot while they look after the interests of banks and big business. They are right to be fed up.

But by building on years of anti-migrant propaganda from the press, the main leave campaigns persuaded too many of those people that the answer to their problems lies in somehow halting migration. Others, the Little Britain Tories, were not economically marginalised of course, but signed up to the anti-migrant rhetoric anyway.