Our national debate has become noxious. Here are the guilty parties

Reasonable people are keeping quiet as the rabidly opinionated shout insults at each other

Naively, after the referendum, I thought it would improve. Instead, it’s getting worse by the day. Political debate has become noxious in Britain, from the Cabinet table to the kitchen table. Politics has always been fractious. In recent times, however, it’s become truly ghastly. One could trace this trend back to any number of causes, but high on the list of culprits must be the fashion for “safe spaces”. These were meant to be there for serious, personal matters – the shrink’s couch, the doctor’s office, the battered women’s shelter. But now, pious university students have expanded the idea much further, making it a guiding principle for public debate.

A hallmark of this trend is that the politically active surround themselves exclusively with affirmation and agreement, allowing them to dismiss challenging views as hurtful, malevolent or simply idiotic. This requires citizens to become neurotics, whereby political opponents are not people of alternative experiences and attitudes, but agents of corrupt influence, peddling their evil ideas in bad faith. Depressingly, the current Cabinet seems to be living up precisely to this image, fighting their bitter battle for power in plain sight.

Scale it up and you have a whole nation believing the worst of its neighbours. You have student “equality” officers, such as Jason Osamede Okundaye at Cambridge University, who can declare, apparently without irony, that “all white people are racist”. You have the efforts of Momentum, the Corbynista activist brigade, whose latest video invites us to hate a well-to-do family of English hypocrites as they quaff prosecco and criticise ordinary people for liking Corbyn over dinner in a suburban garden. Text periodically flashes up: this one inherited money from his father, it says. He’ll be first against the wall, it means, but doesn’t say.

It would be comforting to think that this is a disease confined to the Left. But it isn’t any more, if it ever was. The Brexit campaign helped to spread it on the Right, too. Leave campaigners made a deliberate choice to impugn the motives of all who favoured Remain not because they really believed that every Remainer was, at heart, a corrupt shill in the pay of Brussels, but because it polled well. They took a germ of truth (that the liberal establishment was locked into a pro-eu groupthink) and turned it into a widespread calumny. This presented the referendum as a straightforward choice between virtue and sleaze, rather than a decision between various principles and risks.

Now, with the battle for Brexit still going at full throttle, a certain minority of the Brexiteers have morphed from Eurosceptics into Eurocynics. Rather than casting a sceptical eye on politics, as befits a sophisticated voter, the Eurocynic judges every move by the reductionist philosophy of “us” (the true believers) and “them” (the quislings).

In this outlook, Brexit gradualism cannot possibly be the product of calculated trade-offs in a very complex situation, but part of what Nigel Farage calls “the great Brexit betrayal”. This conveniently ignores the voices of many reasonable Brexiteers, such as Michael Gove, who are trying to deliver Brexit in a cost-efficient and legally sound manner. As with the hard Left, the priority is ideological purity, not sound policy, and to disagree is treason.

This doesn’t exist in isolation, of course. There is now another, newer group of purists entering the fray, the group I currently find most galling, perhaps because of their novelty and prevalence in London, where I live. These are the self-defined “centrists”, or the rabid “stop Brexit” types, who have forgotten that “the centre” isn’t just where you wish it to be; it relates to what people in the country actually think.

These anti-brexiteers seem determined to marginalise themselves by their breathtaking displays of contempt for anyone who disagrees with them. Whereas the hard Leftist deploys shame and the Eurocynic talks of betrayal, the rabid “centrist” shuts down debate with sheer derision. Her opponents are dismissed simply as morons – or racists.

What makes this group all the more irritating is that they aspire to ideals that their behaviour routinely contradicts. They are, in theory, open to debate and nuance. They say they are guided by evidence and facts. Being proved wrong, however (on the immediate Brexit recession, for example), does not even give them pause. Fixated on the lies told by Brexit campaigners, they are hardly conscious of the long, grand lie of the EU, which claims that it isn’t trying to build a superstate. Having so much credibility staked on their position, they cannot back away.

This position is not just guided by facts, though. It’s a profoundly emotional reaction to losing control of our politics, a deep-seated sense of unease about the values and mores of their countrymen and an anxiety about what they see as an attack on their identity as global citizens.

Being the most internationally connected, this group both feed and are fed by a similar contempt for Britain abroad. God knows, with our government making such a fool of itself, this isn’t hard to find – but it goes beyond mere mockery. When foreigners proclaim that Britain is about to start institutionally persecuting Poles or stifling judicial independence, these hard Remainers believe and propagate these absurdities, filled with fear of their own country, which they barely know.

This, then, is the state of our public discourse: three Balkanised groups hating one another. The majority might well lie between them, the people of all stripes who remember how to engage meaningfully with their political opponents, but they are shouted down by the fervent extremes.

The toxic atmosphere is making reasonable people withdraw. The soft Leftists I know are leaving politics. Brexit-divided families have banished political chat from the dining table. Encountering a dogmatic specimen of any type, I myself have become reluctant to engage, weary of the tidal wave of opprobrium coming my way.

This isn’t good for a democracy. It is no doubt enabled by sophisticated technological tools allowing us to build our own online echo chambers. Everyone needs to commiserate with their political compatriots sometimes. But beliefs aren’t sacrosanct. They must be argued for, rather than being protected by the delusion that all dissenters are cruel, stupid or corrupt. Otherwise, when all the reasonable people quit politics, we’ll only have ourselves to blame.