Why I'm In: No one will vote Remain out of love - but I want my country back

A Britain driven from the EU by phantom fears about an invasion force of millions of Turks, or seduced by a sad, atavistic Dad’s Army echo of standing defiantly alone with forces of darkness menacingly poised on the other side of the Channel? No thanks

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson (left), Mayor of London Sadiq Khan (centre) and TUC General Secretary Frances O'Grady during the EU referendum debate (Stefan Rousseau-WPA Pool/Getty Images)

I will vote Remain on Thursday because, with apologies for purloining an imbecilic slogan from the other side of the referendum divide, I Want My Country Back.

Exactly what my country is, I cannot begin to tell you. No one can. Since the Second World War and fall of Empire, it has been famously impossible to define Britishness in any but the most meaninglessly vacuous terms.

But I always thought I knew what my country is not. It isn’t narrow and insular, spiteful and small-minded, intolerant and stupid, cowardly and hysterical. It has these elements within it, as all countries do. At times, it has stronger tendencies towards these and other distasteful qualities than at others.

Yet at its heart, the Britain I recognise as My Country is a relatively decent, pragmatic, centrist, bumbling kind of place with enough ironic detachment to protect it from violent lurches towards extremism.

If on Friday we find ourselves departing the EU, it will be a different, reduced and shrunken country. In time this will be literally so, since almost inevitably Scotland would demand another independence referendum, and secede from the Union within a few years.

It would also be true metaphorically. A Britain driven from the EU by phantom fears about an invasion force of millions of Turks, or enticed by Michael Gove’s surrealist plea to ignore the advice of experts, or seduced by a sad, atavistic Dad’s Army echo of standing defiantly alone with the forces of darkness menacingly poised on the other side of the Channel … that Britain is irreversibly diminished.

There are compellingly strong reasons to dislike the EU. Like any massive bureaucracy, it is prone to corruption and essentially undemocratic (though given that we are regularly ruled by governments voted for by one in four or five of the electorate, it’s hard to affect too snotty a tone about that). And like all bureaucracies, it organically seeks to acquire more power. German imperiousness raises the hackles.

With the possible exception of Ken Clarke, no one will vote Remain out of love. This war, like all wars, is about the lesser of two evils.

Ultimately, we vote with our guts rather than our heads. We make political choices on emotion, and then hunt down the arguments that retroactively make sense of them. This time, as if it needs stating, the dominant emotion on both sides is fear.

For all I know my terrors are no less phantasmal than those of the Brexit persuasion, but their intensity startles me.

I am scared that the malign undercurrents visibly seething in Nigel Farage’s repugnant poster will boil up and over the pan. I am petrified of the forces that could be unleashed in a post-EU, post-Scotland one party state when the next recession bites.

And I am terrified of living in a nation being forcibly regressed - under the joint dominion of a populist right-wing Tory government and the reactionary newspapers that will justifiably claim a personal victory if we leave - to a time before universal human rights formed part of the post-war consensus.

The steampunk post-Brexit Britain is a futuristic Britain of the past - and the past, as everyone knows, is another country. I don’t want to live in another country. I want my country back.