ENGLAND and Wales look like one country on Friday morning, plumping by about five or six percentage points to leave the EU; Scotland, where very nearly two in three voters and every counting area wanted to stay in, looks like another land entirely.

This is only the first, if potentially the most consequential, of the many divisions seared into the map by the referendum. The vote was on the UK’s seat at the table of Europe, but it has served to disunite the kingdom.

At first blush, London, where heavy rains helped push the turnout a notch below the average, appears as the capital of another land again — an island of Euro-enthusiasm amid a south-east that was mostly resolved to quit.

The majorities for remain in some inner-city boroughs in the capital were truly crushing: fully 75 per cent of the ballot in Camden; 78pc in Hackney; 66pc in wealthy Kensington and Chelsea.

But move out a notch from the heart of the metropolis, beyond Zone 3 as the locals would say, and a few of the outlying districts begin to merge into the countryside beyond. To the south, Sutton went 54pc for leave, and to the east, in working-class Barking and Dagenham, 63pc wanted out.

Right across the rest of the south-east, East Anglia, Wales and the Midlands, leave was the rule, and remain the exception. Milton Keynes is often a Middle England bellwether, but remain should have hopes here — a young town, with a relatively young population — but instead its voters narrowly wanted out, by 51pc to 49pc. Swindon, whose two swing parliamentary seats helped crush Ed Miliband’s hopes of No 10 last May, likewise wanted out.

The exceptions, where voters wanted to remain part of Europe, sometimes came in pockets of particular prosperity — supposedly reactionary Tunbridge Wells, for instance was 55pc remain, well-to-do voters there, perhaps, fearing they had more to lose. Then there was a whole cluster of relatively prosperous districts to London’s west, covering parts of Berkshire and Oxfordshire, which provided a pro-European blob on the map.

But the most notable exceptions were the cities in which universities loomed large — 56pc for remain in Norwich, over 60pc in Bristol, rising to 70pc-plus in Oxford and Cambridge. All of these cities home, no doubt, to many of “the experts” derided by the leavers. Exactly the same trends were at work in Wales, with the prosperous Vale of Glamorgan and the student-heavy capital in Cardiff bucking the overall trend.

Leave’s overall lead owed much to a strong performance around the coast, and particularly in the east of England, which had already become known as a Ukip heartland. You can trace the foreshore, around from Rother in East Sussex through Shepway and Dover in Kent, through Southend in Essex and on to Suffolk, and find that leave consistently notched up 60pc or above.

The heart of England wanted out, with, for example, Gloucester and the nearby Forest of Dean district both chalking up a chunky 58pc majority for leave. Indeed, remain struggled right across the breadth of the Midlands, in places of every sort, falling a fraction of a percentage point short in just the same manner, in picturesque High Peak in Derbyshire and big city Birmingham alike. In smaller towns and cities across the region — Wolverhampton, Nuneaton and Bedworth, Kettering — the margin was considerably greater.

Go further north, however, and the picture is less uniform, with a sharper divide between the great cities on the one hand, and smaller boroughs and the countryside on the other. The rural north was as solid for leave as the south, and, in line with the despairing reports from many Labour MPs, old socialist bastions of the second order — Wigan and St Helen’s, Doncaster and Barnsley — were overwhelmingly for leave.

Things were very different, however, in the great northern cities, where the pro-Europeans came out in force. Leave just sneaked a win in Sheffield, it is true, but Leeds, Manchester and Newcastle all went, to a greater or lesser extent, for remain. And in the case of Liverpool and Manchester, neighbouring boroughs such as the Wirral and Trafford wanted to stay in Europe as well. The screaming panic, then, from some parts of the Labour party during the campaign, suggesting that the entire base of the movement was now ripe for wholesale defection to Ukip proved wide of the mark, because these big Labour cities held.

A special word is needed about Northern Ireland, where despite the demand for leave from the dominant Democratic Unionists, 56pc of people voted to stay in the EU, fearing perhaps that Brexit could prefigure a return to the divisions of the past.

For the rest of the country, the divisions revealed by this map are newer — but not entirely novel. As in the last general election, most of the UK has gone one way, but Scotland, London, university towns and several other big cities have gone quite another. One might rationalise this diversity, but it leaves a decidedly scrappy electoral map.

There is a big difference here with the last referendum in 1975, when a solid victory for staying in the EEC, as it then was, was replicated, more or less uniformly, across the country, with islands off the north and west of Scotland being the only exception. British politics has fractured beyond all recognition since then, and this referendum has greatly deepened all the divides.

—By arrangement with The Guardian

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2016