Like most people engaged (or even remotely interested) in politics right now, I’ve spent a lot of the last two weeks trying to work out how on earth we got here: to a situation where the UK is on its way out of the EU, and with most of our assumptions about British politics turned completely on their head.

I’m not for a minute saying that I have managed to work it out, but working on the assumption that writing things down can help to clarify them – and that if we’re hoping to shape what happens next, it’s a pretty good idea to have thought about what came before – here are six things that I think helped contribute to a Leave vote.

(The usual caveats about lists apply.  It’s not exhaustive, and there will be plenty of things I’ve overlooked.  But right now, for me, these are the main themes that I keep coming back to when trying to make sense of it all.)

1. The impact of globalisation on working class people in rich countries.  As this fascinating Washington Post article shows, over the last 20 years, every single group of people in the world (rich people in rich countries, rich people in poor countries, poor people in poor countries) has seen their living standards improve except poor people in rich countries. They are globalisation’s losers, and nowhere near enough has been done to acknowledge or address that problem, and so those people are rightly angry.  This is not just a British phenomenon – you only need to look at the success of Donald Trump, Marine le Pen and others – but by holding a referendum that put the status quo on one side and the opportunity for change on the other, we provided a lightning rod.

2. Labour complacency, followed by confusion, over the impact of immigration. From the end of the 1990s onwards, as the UK embraced globalisation and opened up to the world, we moved incredibly quickly to a new, multicultural future without acknowledging that not everyone would welcome it as rapidly as liberal professionals in big cities. The accession of Eastern European countries to the EU in 2004 with no transitional controls played a part in that, but there was also a wider, less tangible sense that no one was allowed to express any kind of concern about immigration without being labelled a racist or a bigot. The public space to air any kind of concerns was shut down, meaning people had to look elsewhere to find an outlet. This was exacerbated by the Miliband years in which immigration was correctly identified as a weakness for Labour, but for which the solution proposed was not to address the issue head-on, but rather to “move the conversation onto something else”.

3. Nigel Farage’s UKIP rebranding. The UKIP of the 1990s was a laughable fringe party obsessed with the idea of “sovereignty” above all else. They asked people why they would want their laws made in Brussels when those laws could be made in Westminster. But for most people, Westminster was just as distant and unaccountable as Brussels, so the idea never caught anyone’s imagination. Then Farage, like the expert campaigner he is, decoupled ends from means: while his main concern over the EU might have been about sovereignty, he saw that the major issue for those people whose votes he needed was immigration. So why not pivot the party’s focus and promise instead that leaving the EU would mean taking back control of our borders, rather than our laws?

4. David Cameron’s infuriating short-termism. Trying to hold his party together, first through a painful (half-finished) process of modernisation, and then through the compromises of coalition, Cameron used “Brussels” as the catch-all bad guy for anything and everything that was going wrong. Never one to engage in difficult, long-term thinking if he could instead postpone today’s crisis with a cheap shot, Cameron never looked beyond the horizon and saw that he was simultaneously damaging the brand of the EU in the eyes of British people, and burning every possible bridge he might need further down the line. Remarkably, he even carried on doing this once he’d set the country on the path to the referendum and so knew that such a reckoning was coming.

5. The spectre of Scotland. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that everything in politics seems so unpredictable at the moment, people clung to the precedent which they thought had been set during the Scottish independence referendum: a “safety first, don’t rock the boat” approach, with a late swing to the status quo. But it was never as simple as that: what was being defended in Scotland was a 300 year old union, intimately bound up with ideas of culture, identity and patriotism – not a 40-year old economic project which only gradually grew into a multi-lingual, multi-cultural union of distinct countries. People also seemed to forget that the Scottish referendum was an incredibly close-run thing, and that Better Together very nearly lost it. On top of that, Labour’s subsequent annihilation in Scotland in May 2015 led party strategists (wrongly, in my view) to believe that the problem was having shared platforms with the Tories. So any similar spirit of bipartisan cooperation was scrapped in favour of protecting a domestic political base.

6. The simultaneous loss of our most pro-EU voices. From a Remain perspective, the last thing we needed, a year before the referendum, was for the unashamedly pro-European Liberal Democrats to be decimated and for Labour to elect as its new leader a former Eurosceptic, who even now could only be described as ambivalent about Europe at best. The Lib Dems could never make enough noise on their own, and Labour was (and still is) trying to work out how to speak to and for disenfranchised working class voters who are concerned about immigration and moving over to UKIP. Perhaps not surprisingly, many people did not consider a full-throated defence of EU membership to be a key part of that strategy. Add to that the fact that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was seen as under threat from day one, and that his critics within Labour decided to make the local elections the key test of his viability, and you had a Labour party fixated on winning on 5 May before they would even start to think about what was going to happen on 23 June.

There were of course lots of other factors which influenced the outcome – a rising anti-establishment view that had been brewing ever since the expenses scandal; vast swathes of the media being run by people who would financially benefit from EU anti-competition laws no longer applying to them; the persistent and immensely frustrating unwillingness of most people below the age of 25 to actually vote – but the ones above are the ones that I personally keep coming back to.

None of those challenges present easy solutions.  The fact is that the UK government – whichever party is in power – needs a proper industrial and economic strategy to look after those people who have suffered most at the hands of globalisation. Labour has to have a mature debate about immigration, which needs to acknowledge that people’s concerns are valid without running away from open, tolerant, liberal values. The Conservative party needs to decide which is most important: reducing immigration or growing the economy, because you can’t have both.

That’s not to say that rising to such challenges is impossible.  Anyone looking for a sliver of hope, and some useful pointers as to what we can do next, could do a lot worse than study the campaign to get Sadiq Khan elected as London Mayor. The people behind it ran a positive campaign in which the candidate neutered the strikes against him without ever abandoning his values. He won across the whole of the city: he had support from business leaders, from faith groups, from civil society and trade unions, and he motivated young people to come out and vote. And he is, so far, governing with the same sense of optimistic realism that characterised his campaign.  Yes, his was a London-centric campaign and quite often London might as well be a different country.  But in these dark days Khan’s success is a beacon of hope – and as we try to wrestle with the realities of a post-EU UK, his is the example I think we should follow.