A decade is a long time in politics. It’s been ten years since the Brexit referendum, and we’re on our sixth prime minister, our seventh defence secretary, our eighth chancellor of the exchequer, and our ninth foreign secretary. Give it another month or so, and those numbers will grow further. ‘Strong and stable,’ promised David Cameron in the 2015 general election, which isn’t quite how it has always appeared. Nor has it often felt that we ‘got our country back’, as Nigel Farage offered.

It’s all been a bit of a mess, a confusion that has not yet worked its way through the political system, and it has disturbed the existing parties, creating new camps of Leaver and Remainer.

In fact, that dividing line has long been part of British politics, going back to the days of the imperialist and the Little Englander in the nineteenth century: the clash between those who sought power and glory through the Empire, and those who argued for free trade and a withdrawal from the colonies. The result of that dispute was a kind of compromise: a free-trade Empire. And it worked, growing wider still and wider, reaching a peak at the start of the 1920s, when the Treaty of Versailles gave Britain some of the old German colonies. It was the biggest empire in human history, on which the sun famously never set.

But the centre couldn’t hold and, starting with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Empire fell apart with unexpected speed. By 1970, the land area of the colonies that remained was smaller than England itself, with a population less than that of London. There persisted a memory of what had been, in the form of the Commonwealth, but it was – at the highest valuation – a far-flung family, rather than any kind of serious power-bloc in the world. So where, asked the imperialists, should Britain go now?

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The radical answer was to reassert the ethical imperialism of the nineteenth century, most notably with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. ‘We have lost the world’s leadership – for what it was worth – in power politics,’ says a teacher in Jack Trevor Story’s 1963 novel Something for Nothing, ‘but by being the first country to abandon nuclear weapons we would be leading the world again on the only path left.’ This tendency survives in the pursuit of Net Zero. As Ed Miliband put it, ‘the UK has a particular responsibility to lead the world and show the way forward for a greener future.’

Meanwhile, the establishment solution to the problem of Britain’s post-imperial role was to look to the Continent, where six countries had signed the 1951 Treaty of Paris, bringing into being the European Coal and Steel Community, and then the Treaty of Rome in 1957, setting up the European Economic Community. Britain had not been involved in those initiatives, but by 1960 it was felt that this was the only way forward. Britain could only retain its status in the world by subsuming itself into the supranational European project of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman. It was, said Labour’s Denis Healey, ‘imperialism with an inferiority complex’.

Healey was not alone in this judgement. In 1971, Conservative MP Enoch Powell told American talk-show host Dick Cavett that in the drive to join the EEC, ‘there’s a great deal of this instinctive post-imperial wish to be big’. The following year, as Tory prime minister Edward Heath signed the Treaty of Accession, he spelt it out: this was ‘the end of a glorious era, that of the British Empire, and the beginning of a whole new chapter of British history.’

And for four decades, this was the settled view. Membership of the EEC (and then the European Union) wasn’t glorious by any measure, but it was at least something. Combined with Britain’s permanent seat of the Security Council of the Union Nations and with the possession of nuclear weapons, it meant the country could still hold a place on the world stage. It could still ‘punch above our weight,’ as politicians liked to say in the 1990s. This, according to the governing elite, was what not only they but the people wanted. ‘The British,’ wrote former Labour prime minister Tony Blair in 2010, ‘prefer their prime ministers to stand tall internationally.’

He was, of course, wrong. The vote to leave the EU demonstrated that. By a narrow margin, the British people rejected the imperialist dream. Which sent the governing classes into a state of panic. In their grief, they’ve tried denial, bargaining and anger, and are currently depressed. Acceptance seems some way off yet.

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The old instincts are still there, though. The psychology of imperialism was generations in the making, and has proved hard to shift. So it’s been turned inwards, directed at those who were foolish enough to vote Leave. The passive-aggressive paternalism of the Blair years, chiding us for smoking tobacco and eating junk food, has got more and more tetchy in recent years. As Southport, Epping, Southampton, Belfast et al have shown, the natives have been getting restless, they’ve been listening to troublemakers and rabblerousers, and they need to be reminded who runs the place.

Stalin’s great contribution to political thought was to popularise the theory of socialism in one country. Since the referendum, there’s been a strong sense of colonialism in one country.

Little of this is about Europe, of course. It never really was, and no one serious is now proposing that Britain should rejoin the EU. Powell’s prediction of membership has proved to be entirely accurate: ‘We should simply be merged into something very different. Or, at any rate, be refusing all the time to be merged in it – and there’s not much future in that.’ It’s certainly not about trade arrangements and customs unions, nor even about immigration, massive though that issue is.

At heart, the central question remains that one of post-imperial identity. Is Britain to be a major player in world politics, or is the priority to get its own house in order?

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The two great blocks of British opinion survive: the conservative and the radical. What has happened in the last couple of decades has been a splintering within those blocks, so that the Tories have faced competition from Nigel Farage in his various incarnations, and the old Labour/Liberal rivalry has been disrupted by the rise of Celtic nationalism and the Greens. This is not entirely unprecedented. Historically, the radical block has been particularly susceptible to splits (Liberal Unionists, Labour Party, SDP). The difference this time, as the referendum made clear, is that dissatisfaction is found in both blocks, and is therefore taking longer to resolve.

Nonetheless, the logic of first-past-the-post suggests that the internal divisions will be resolved, as they have been before, and the most plausible outcome is a return to the old, established parties. That assumes that both Labour and Conservative reinvent themselves (again), to absorb their next-door rivals. And in that endeavour, it feels to me that Labour are lagging, the party of the public sector still hung up on being colonial administrators. The Tories have the edge, claiming for themselves the tradition of the Little Englander that used to belong to the radicals – from Richard Cobden through Lloyd George to Tony Benn. And that is where most British people now are.

As with so much of the Right’s history over the last half-century, Enoch Powell’s arguments are going to prove pivotal: ‘I’m trying to tell the people of Britain that they don’t have to be big to be great.’