well said, steve. i used to feel that the world was generally progressing in a more enlightened, more liberal way with a few stumbling blocks here and there. in recent years - in this country anyway - we just keep going backwards and as you say it's a 'new isolationist narrative' driven by global capitalists and the very wealthy. i've heard and read many defences of the idea of a hard brexit - they all boil down to a gut, emotional feeling about foreigners or a thinly disguised, more eloquently expressed, racism.