This was no ordinary election.  A blindingly obvious thing to say, perhaps, but an important one nonetheless.

We were asked an absolutely enormous, existential question by our government – and one that boiled down to just two answers, ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’.  We were subject to campaigns from both sides which were defined by anger rather than reason, and in the end a little more than half of the country chose to leave.  It was decisive, and we should respect that decision.  Now is not the time to look backwards and pick over the mechanics of it all, but instead to look forwards and think about what happens next.

That said, two things that make the referendum different to other elections are worth bearing in mind as we think about the future.

The first is that it was an election based on proportional representation in a country that is defined by its first-past-the-post system.  If you’re a Tory in Liverpool, or a Labour voter in Berkshire, your candidate is never going to be on the winning side. So why not put a cross in the box next to UKIP or the Greens instead? They will never get in, but at least it sends a message. Should we really be surprised if, in a referendum campaign dominated more by heat than light, they thought perhaps the same rules might apply here?

That’s why I don’t think those on the Remain side should be making the few people who say they now regret their ‘Leave’ vote the scapegoats for what has happened.  If you want someone to blame for that, blame those in power who did not explain the terms of the referendum properly.  And remember that there are nowhere near enough regretful Leave voters to have tipped the balance in the other direction, and that if we had voted 52-48 in favour of ‘Remain’ then an equal number of people would probably be thinking “what if?” and wondering if they should have voted Leave.  It’s wrong to focus on that small group of people, and a distraction from what we need to be thinking about right now.

The second difference is even more important, because it points to what might happen next. We’re used to voting for political parties, single units defined (roughly) by a set of values turned into specific policies in a published manifesto. When that party gets into power, we know (again, roughly) what to expect from them and we have a set of promises to hold them to in future.

That’s not the case this time. The ‘Leave’ camp was not a coherent entity, and so no one single politician within it is going to feel bound to enact what another one committed to. They all have a different view of what a post-EU UK looks like. We’re already seeing that: Dan Hannan doesn’t think that we should put restrictions on immigration, which for others was the key issue of the debate; Nigel Farage doesn’t think that any money saved by leaving the EU should be spent on the NHS, which to some was a cornerstone of the Leave campaign.

This isn’t business as usual; this is pick‘n’mix politics, a kind of Darwinian policy-making in which only the most populist will survive. Every single element of our national life which was previously defined by our EU membership is potentially up for grabs. If we want certain things to survive into our brave new post-EU world, we’re going to have to fight for them.

As a Labour party member, trust me when I say that now is not the time to walk off the field of play. When we lost power in 2010, we spent six months navel-gazing while the Conservatives defined the terms of debate for the next five years: a focus on deficit reduction and public service cuts above all else. Then again, after the 2015 general election, we indulged in a lengthy and bitter leadership campaign while the sequence of events was put in place that led to last Thursday’s vote, and the Leave side started campaigning in earnest straight away.

We simply cannot afford to let the same thing happen now. We need to decide what it is about our country that we value most and make sure that those things are at the heart of this new process of national self-realisation.

People will have different views about what they should be.  For my money, it’s workers’ rights, environmental protection and the fight against tax avoidance. All of those policy areas were defined by our EU membership. I don’t want to see vital protections for British workers and key pieces of climate change legislation redefined as “red tape” and abandoned. I don’t want to see my country turned into an offshore tax haven for the rest of Europe in a desperate attempt to stop businesses leaving for somewhere else.

That is our task now, and it is  vital. Before last week, many people said that the question we should be asking was: “what kind of country do we want to be?”. That wasn’t a one-off; we need to be asking ourselves that question every day while the future of our nation and its relationship with the wider world is negotiated for us by a disparate set of politicians who never stood on a single platform and do not have a unified plan for the future.

So to everyone who cares about what happens next, I say this: I know that things seem uncertain, scary and potentially pretty bleak.  They do to me too.  But this is no time to sit back and leave the big decisions to somebody else.  We’ve got work to do.