After spending the weekend in a wounded and, arguably, defeatist funk, I’m finally finding myself able to be a bit more rational about what has happened. The initial shock has worn off, the anger is down to a low simmer and sense of betrayal filed under “revisit later”. It’s part… not acceptance, because I don’t think I ever will accept the result as truly legitimate, let alone right, but something similar. Resigned pragmatism, let’s call it. But it’s also part mild hope that we may yet not follow through on this lunacy after all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty damned cross, disgusted and afraid. But it’s no longer on an all-consuming level. I’m able to think about it without wanting to cry or break something. So I’ve started giving a bit of brainspace to how we can proceed, what we should be doing to clean up this mess as best we can.

There are lots of layers to our situation, all of which present their own challenges and opportunities. The most immediate are probably the financial ones. Then there’s the social ones, while the country resettles itself around some newly defined divisions. Finally, there’s the political ones, which are clearly going to be more significant than most had guessed at.

The Economic

As is to be expected, the first thing to happen was economic chaos. The markets will continue to wobble about trying to decide where the lowest-risk/highest-reward ground state is until – if – we enact Article 50 and get handed our international P45. The pound is going to take a hammering, to at least a fair degree, but this needn’t be all bad.

We can take the opportunity to look at bringing some industries back ‘in house’. This would be particularly sensible if we prioritised the energy industry, our transport infrastructure, construction, engineering and IT. Firstly, because we need to be more self-sufficient now importing isn’t as favourable and we’re currently outsourcing too much as it is. Secondly because they all bring with them easily exportable benefits, either in the form of goods or of services. A weaker pound should make us more competitive at selling them out to the world than we have been, so we can cut our costs and increase our profits.

As an aside to this, I know a lot of people would be quite vocal about the same argument for ‘manufacturing’ in general. It’s easy to hark back to the days of the British car industry, for example. However, we’d now be far more dependent on international commodity markets in order to import the raw materials. We’d also be competing against some well-established giants, such as Germany, and therefore starting from the back of the pack. I don’t think it would make sense to play against others’ strengths in such a way, so we should be more choosy about where we invest our efforts.

Pushing to lead in renewable technologies or precision engineered parts would be a worthwhile goal, reached via applying our efforts to our own ailing infrastructure and skill pool. Better transport infrastructure and more affordable homes, so Britons are more invested in and able to capitalise on the British economy itself.

We should also be eagerly modernising our national data infrastructure so we’re well placed to compete in the ever-important Information Realm. This will surely be the 21^st century’s equivalent to colonial-era India & Americas, providing a vast market for goods and services the world over. One that is less reliant on imported materials and which we should be well-placed to populate with skilled workers.

There’ll be more financial aftershocks as the terms of exit are made clear, especially if – as looks likely – London loses a lot of EU service institutions. We have long needed to shift away from our dependence on financial services, a move curiously absent nearly a decade on from the global financial crisis of 2008.

Meanwhile, we need to revisit what it means to ‘grow’ outside of the tunnel-vision world of banking and GDP as a measure of how much money is moving around. A significant part of the leave campaign was fearmongering talk of healthcare tourism. Whether it is real or not, I’ve been wondering to myself if the assumption such is a bad thing may be a faulty one. I’ve not heard anyone seriously float the idea so make of it what you will, but couldn’t we turn it into a good thing? By investing in our healthcare system to a point where it has the quality and the resources to handle extra capacity over domestic needs, we could use it to turn a profit. Come to Britain to get fixed! For example, people coming over from places like the US for more reasonably priced treatment would not only bring money, but also undermine the growing danger of transnational HMOs.

While we’re on public spending, we’re going to need to look at welfare reform. The economic impacts of Brexit are going to hurt people, which tends to mean ‘hurt poor people’. Rather than risk even greater disenfranchisement and worsening the situation that led to all this, we should protect against it. The stealthy, patronising ‘privatisation for your own good’ project of austerity needs to be dropped if we are to grow – socially and economically – in our new, more isolated environment.

Of the few points I do think many leave supporters got right, a conscious decision to build an economy that is sustainable and works for its constituent parts is probably the best. The post war project of the enfranchised electorate, who are getting a good deal from their country, needs to be restarted. We should have a majority – a vast majority – who have enough invested in society that it is in their interests to protect it and grow it.

The Social

So from the economic arguments, I think we can draw a fairly strong conclusion that a socially invested population is a Good Thing. Not only is it healthier and happier, but is more resilient, cohesive and better able to be outward looking and constructive.

I’ll not reiterate the points covered already, other than to emphasise that it is a failure to pursue this end that led us to where we are in the first place. If we learn nothing else, we must take from all this the fact that an invested, involved society is the reason for preferring one political or economic model over another. When presented with a choice, the first question that comes to mind should be “will this make it better?” not “am I pissed off enough to hit this until it breaks?”

First of all, there are some dangers that the current situation has brought to the fore. Perhaps most worrying is the rise of what is generally considered the ‘far right’. I use the scare quotes because we must be careful to recognise it’s not really leftwing or rightwing in nature. It is nothing more – but also, I must stress, also nothing less – than a movement of nationalist hate, of fear turning to fascism and disenfranchisement turning to division.

It needs to be made very clear that it will not be tolerated, which in turn means it cannot be pandered to for political gain. A line needs to be drawn in the sand, whereby people who support such put themselves outside of the political discourse, unless they open up and engage with alternative perspectives. Liberalism and democracy are fine traditions, but they can only function as reliably beneficial ideologies if they protect themselves against illiberal and anti-democratic forces. Secularism can and should tolerate difference, but only for those elements which will tolerate it in return. This is not a moral statement so much as a definitional one: if they do not have boundaries, they do not have meaning.

All of which feeds into the realisation that we need to have a deep, far-reaching rethink of the goals and approaches to our democratic system. Democracy has seen its successes due to the fact it is a self-correcting system. It allows for the testing of different views and ideas, which all eventually moderate each other. By such a process, we find what works best in general and can seek ways to improve it further.

The key to this is education. Better education has demonstrable economic benefits, in terms of more exportable skills, increased rates of technological and scientific innovation and general wellbeing. Beyond this, it also means the people involved in the honing of concepts and practices (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) are better equipped to do it well. We are more likely to come up with new good ideas and solutions, as well as being better able to identify, address and avoid bad ones.

In being keener spotters of bullshit and greater contributors of value, we’ll make less mistakes and more positive steps forward. There needs to be a respect for facts and an accountability imposed on those who try to distort or outright bury them. We can only do this if the majority of people are educated properly in critical thinking. We need to be a society that understands the importance of facts, respects them even when we don’t necessarily like them and are able to assess them constructively.

But in doing this, we don’t want to end up indoctrinating ourselves into a single accepted version of the truth. Received wisdom is not the same as wisdom received. History is full of movements that started off addressing a legitimate problem but failed to recognise when the world had changed in such a way as their efforts became irrelevant or even harmful. There is no one set of answers and we need to be awake to this reality. The solution to one problem may bring into existence other problems. A problem once solved may resurface.

So we don’t want a homogeneity to overwhelm us, to become drones to the status quo. Democracy only works if there is internal dissent, but we need to foster an environment where it is useful rather than disruptive. We need to understand that disagreement doesn’t mean division. To understand that this project, no matter how strongly we be attached to our own position or opposed to that of others, is one of cooperation rather than conflict.

We are all, essentially, meat-based problem-solving machines and we are working on at least broadly the same set of problems. By working together, listening and contributing in equal measure, we stand a far better chance of solving them than if we’ve convinced ourselves we’re all working towards different goals. Whether we are working together or not is probably a matter of perspective, but we certainly should be.

The Political

The kingpin to all this is our politics. It is what governs and enacts our economic and legislative decisions. We have a political system in the first place only as a tool to do this on our behalf. So if we want to bring about positive change, we need to make sure that tool is a good one, well-crafted and wielded by people skilled in its application. I think the one thing all on both sides of the Brexit debate can agree on without hesitation is that is not currently the case.

I think that the single most important change needed to fix this is to increase political accountability. Manifesto promises should not be made unless they’ve been well-enough considered to be followed through with. Don’t promise no raise to university tuition unless you know you can afford to deliver it and intend to do so, for example. We are people meant to be persuaded to allow politicians to represent our interests, not to be brought over with promises that they have no intention of keeping.

So we need to reform legislation surrounding political discourse. This might be for ‘grand campaigns’ such as general election manifestos or referenda, but equally it should apply to the day-to-day outpouring of statements from public figures. I don’t pretend we can eliminate PR-waffle and creative wording, but we should dissuade them as best we can. We should certainly make outright, demonstrable lies more painful than they are profitable.

Even then, they will still be told. But when caught out, there must be consequences. There’s some value in us being educated well enough to see the lie coming, but there’s even more in being able to sanction those who tell it to us.

We also need vote reform. Again, this shouldn’t apply to just general elections, but anything that is put to the people to decide. We should be past the simplistic mentality of tyranny by majority or first-past-the-post “that’ll do-ism”. Until recently, it seems about 52% of the voting public were unhappy with the status quo. That is wrong. Now, 48% of are unhappy with the new status quo. That is also wrong, in near-as-damn-it equal measure.

That means a step away from binary thinking, of proportional representation – I don’t mean the voting system per se, but definitely the concepts underlying it – and multifaceted decision-making processes. This may necessitate the most significant change of all, which is to our current party-political arrangements.

To this end, it seems desirable (and currently quite likely) that party lines be redrawn. Maybe we need to get more used to coalition governments, but amongst a wider range of more equally-balanced parties or even sub-coalitions. As an example, rather than an actual suggestion, the left of Labour could merge with the majority of the Lib Dems and Greens. Others could merge with the centrist elements of the Tories, with the right of that party setting up shop with UKIP.

This could have several benefits. It would increase the chance of a two-party coalition that has to focus on compromise over ideological opportunism. It would prevent the kind of real politik manoeuvring that pushed Cameron into calling the EU referendum in the first place, as appeasing the fringes would be less valuable than finding common ground with the other major parties.

I should perhaps repeat that the above is just an example. I think it would be better if we were working with perhaps five or six factions who have to work towards compromise, rather than just three. However, the underlying sentiment should be clear; less one-party power, less unfettered ideology, more representation of interests across a wider spectrum of society.

But even at the level of the ‘big picture’, there are changes that could and should be made. The left in this country needs an internal revolution of perspective. It needs to accept that markets matter and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It should look at how to make them work fairly but without destroying competition, not how to simply make them go away. The fantasy – as appealing as I and many others may find it – that we can reach some sort of meritocratic utopia will only be realised if we become a post-scarcity civilisation. Regrettably that is a very long way off indeed.

Meanwhile, the right needs to get back to brass tacks. At root, it comes from the individualist approach of a society of equal opportunities, healthy but above-board competition between members and socio-economic Darwinism. There needs to be some honest introspection by many on the right as to whether this is the direction we’re headed. It would also be helpful to envisage what kind of end goal we’d like that evolutionary process to lead to. I’m pretty sure that it shouldn’t be one of corporatism and structural inequality.

Both sides need to make sure the outliers are not courted to make up the numbers. The dangers stemming from far-left or far-right extremism aren’t just threats to our society, but have global extent. We must not legitimise or otherwise fuel them. If we think that, as a species, we’ve outgrown totalitarianism and large-scale war, we’re deluded. We still regularly exhibit an alarming lack of compassion and propensity for indifference towards suffering that we should be deeply ashamed of. And deeply worried about.

If I could summarise all the above into a relatively simple idea, it is this: we need to prove we meant what we said about wanting to improve Europe. We need to become – apparently on our own, for now – what we wanted it to be and what many of us believed it could be. Our goal should be to become a microcosm of that. To lead by example and, it is my hope, with the aim of one day being able to reintegrate with the EU in a way that is to the benefit of all.