This is hardcore. Prime Minister Theresa May has said that not only will Britain leave the European Union, it will leave the single market, which gives Britain privileged, tariff-free access to its biggest trading partner. Staying in the single market “would, to all intents and purposes, mean not leaving the EU at all.”

This means that May has put border controls and withdrawal from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ahead of trade. The withdrawal from the ECJ is particularly important, since being bound by its decisions means being bound by the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The range of the ECJ’s remit extends from trading and market regulations to home affairs, civil liberties, justice, immigration, and asylum. In recent years, it was the ECJ which ruled against deportations of foreign criminals with a child, and denying prisoners the vote. The British state will now be at liberty to revisit these and other issues.

Race figures prominently in this. The ability to keep out immigrants, to bolster authoritarian state apparatuses, to lock up, deport, exclude, extradite, and extraordinarily render, comes before the interests of the City of London and the CBI. Britain’s colonial past is never entirely in the past — though, “Britain” may be in the past very soon, since Scotland’s secession has now been made much more likely.