Future generations may well ask why the UK decided to leave the EU.

The country became wealthy in the EU as one of the top five largest economies in the world.

This meant more income from tax for a Government to spend on the NHS, for infrastructure projects, for defence and policing and to support poorer people and those out of work. It meant that businesses did well and employed more people – the country thrived.

They will recognise that the EU had many faults but that overall we did well as a member.

They will acknowledge that some areas in the UK did suffer from lack of support for populations that grew too quickly through free movement of people – but that our own Governments could have done something about it and never did.

Future generations will wonder why people voted to leave when overall we did so well and they will have to study hard to realise what happened.

They will need to know that certain elements of the media run by very wealthy men spent 40 years slagging off the EU and foreigners generally and pining for a time long past for our country.

They will need to know about the other wealthy men who supported the leave campaign with vast amounts of money for reasons that were never made clear at the time.

They will need to know that vast social media platforms sought to make money money from selling people’s data without telling them to secretive people who in turn sought to use it on behalf of other wealthy men to persuade people to vote for something which was not in their own best interests.

Future generations will know that the wealthy Brexit elite told people we didn’t have the laws to control our borders because of the EU when we did all along. They will know people were told we were weak and powerless against other EU countries but that we will not be weak and helpless with other countries outside of the EU – and lots of people fell for that.

People were told that a reckless and untrustworthy US President was careful and trustworthy when he said he would give us a good trade deal after we leave even at the same time as punishing the UK with steel tariffs and telling everyone that he would place America (and Russia?) first.

History will show that there were parts of the UK that suffered from unemployment and lacked infrastructure and didn’t share the wealth of the country as other parts did – but that was true before EU membership and will be true afterwards.

They will notice that those who led the leave campaign all ran away when the impossible promises they made for their own political purposes were slowly exposed.

Historians may well point out that social injustices in the UK were not addressed by leaving the EU – that the fault lay within UK governance and how we ran our own country – but by then it was too late.