Another John, the idea of a nation state as conceived in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries is no longer very relevant as populations have changed and in every country you find people of different ethnic and cultural descent.

I’m not referring only to immigration from outside Europe but to significant population shifts within Europe itself. Farage and Johnson are quite mistaken in thinking they can turn the calendar back by several generations.

I was watching a programme this afternoon where they were interviewing passers-by in the UK. One young man who had voted to remain spoke like a perfect Englishman, complete with what I think is a lower middle class accent. His features, however, were Asian and I’m guessing he’s second or third generation immigrant.

This young man is British and feels British but he can’t have any nostalgia for “the greatness that was Britain”. For him, the empire and the British Raj have completely different connotations than they have for Farage.

For those like him the concept of Europe is more meaningful and relevant than ‘Great Briitain’ and there are millions of young people like that all over the European continent.

I think the anthropology of modern Europe is extremely complex and dynamic and is not well-understood by many politicians in the EU, especially those of the far right.

Ideally, yes, and one day far from now, that will happen. You forget that Europe was a mass of hundreds of principalities and dukedoms not so long ago, that little Italy itself was a group of city-states.

When one has a problem, he does not run away from it as Britain did, but tries to be a catalyst for real change from within. I am conscious that the European Union needs to look inwards and make an urgent and serious reassessment of its economic and political role as a bigger club taking into consideration the diversity of its members.

The European Union needs also to reassess the ultra bureaucratic set up which is, in many cases, exploited financially by the politicians to create goodies and status for those paying lip service to the incumbent Governments.

What should replace nations? A border-free world? Free movement for 7 billion people?

You really do have a problem, don’t you. If you don’t like living in the European Union, perhaps you should sit down with a cup of coffee and remember what it was like living outside it. And enough with the dumb dreams of nationalism.