THIS has been a week that has made me want to curl up under the duvet and hide. When I wrote my column last week, urging left-wing voters not to vote Leave as they’d be inadvertently jumping on a right-wing train, I had no idea just how ugly the atmosphere would become.

We will need to await the outcome of the legal processes to fully understand the circumstances of Jo Cox’s brutal killing. But folk like Nigel Farage should shoulder some responsibility. Behind that cheeky grin and blokeish demeanour lurks a dangerous demagogue who is not averse to whipping up paranoia.

Farage is a skilled communicator who daily exploits genuine working class alienation to wind people up into a frenzy. The only thing missing from that image of him smirking as he points behind to a thronging queue of immigrants is a swastika on his left sleeve and a little black moustache under his nose.

I found it intriguing that of the 50 or so visible faces on the poster, almost all were young men, even though over half the immigrants who have come to the UK in the past 20 years have been female and many have been children. But an honest representation of the demography of the immigrant population would not have suited Farage’s purposes.

The Leave campaign, driven at the top by a sense of superiority rooted in England’s long imperial history, has ruthlessly recruited the dispossessed to its cause by blaming foreigners for low wages, unaffordable housing and crumbling public services. The chasm left by New Labour, which long ago abandoned class politics in favour of wishy-washy liberalism, has steadily been filled in England by the forces of right-wing reaction. The election of Jeremy Corbyn came 10 years too late.

If the polls are accurate, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will vote to stay in while England will vote to get out. And as the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole shrewdly pointed out in The Guardian this week, “when you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement”. It may be wrapped up in the flag of the United Kingdom, but “the passion that animates it is English self-assertion”. The campaign, says O’Toole, is fuelled by “a mythology of England proudly 'standing alone'."

I remember being lectured by some left-leaning people on the No side during the independence referendum about the danger of "nationalism" and how it was always reactionary and dangerous.

They were 100 per cent wrong – as the explosion of left wing ideas that accompanied the Scottish referendum demonstrated. There were competing visions for an independent Scotland back in 2014, but pretty much all of them were somewhere on a continuum between Nordic social democracy and full-blown socialism. None of them involved barricading ourselves in to ensure the continued domination of the white population. Nationality was about geography rather than genetics, and the Yes side insisted that all those who live and work in Scotland have a right to claim Scottish identity.

Brexit, unfortunately, is based on an uglier version of nationalism. But it has touched some raw nerves, and not just in England.

It is right to challenge racism and xenophobia. People over-estimate the number of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers to staggering degrees. Recent research by Ipsos Mori found that when people are asked to guess the proportion of the population that is "foreign-born", they put it at about 31 per cent. It is actually around 13 per cent.

They also exaggerate the proportion of refugees and asylum seekers amongst that 13 per cent – and they hardly ever mention students, even though they make up by far the largest proportion of immigrants. Irrationally, people from Europe are seen as less of a threat to jobs than people coming from Muslim countries.

Armed with such information, it can be tempting to turn up our noses and sneer at the xenophobia of those who believe the mythology. But if we are to challenge it we also need to listen to people and offer solutions that make sense in their day-to-day lives.

Too many governments in London have adopted an attitude that can be roughly summed up in the words “We’re not racist, but…”.They have sought to appease rather than resist racism. And now they are reaping the whirlwind. The EU referendum has been the catalyst for a dripping tap of prejudice, fear and loathing to be turned on full blast, flooding alienated communities.

Neither have political parties or trade unions come up with any convincing policies that can cut across racism. Wages for millions of workers are falling in real terms – that is the reality in the UK 2016. Nigel Farage blames it all on immigrants who are prepared to work for lower rates. They’re an easy target, and the solution seems simple. Get out of the EU and the downward pressure is off.

Meanwhile the employers who are profiteering from lower wages are left unchallenged. Who is campaigning to regulate the free market in wage rates? Who is arguing for employers to be subject to the same mass of regulations and restrictions that trade unions have long faced?

And the same applies in the private housing sector. Yes, immigrants need homes to live in. And yes, when demand rises, so do rents. But who is arguing for the return of rent controls to curb the greed of profiteering landlords?

Whatever the outcome of Thursday’s referendum, it’s high time we put under scrutiny those who are exploiting the free movement of people to make themselves even wealthier.

In England, the left also needs to seriously grapple with English nationalism.

Up to now, no-one other than Billy Bragg has seemed interested in reclaiming the Flag of St George from the right.

This EU referendum has underlined the need for progressive people in England to stop hiding behind the Union flag and start talking seriously and honestly about what it means to be English.

Scotland will become an independent state, hopefully sooner rather than later. But we will continue to share a single island – and it is in all our interests that England shakes off the resentful superiority complex rooted in loss of empire and finally becomes a nation at ease with its own identity, prepared to offer a warm welcome to the peoples of the world.