A month from now Britain will either have renewed its vows to Europe or served the divorce papers. Either way, it will be a momentous occasion in the life of the nation. And, as with any marriage or separation, there’s no telling quite how things will shape up after it. For either party.

The referendum result is widely deemed very hard to predict. Which won’t stop pundits of all persuasions and all levels of expertise or none trying to predict it. So let me try – not just to predict the way the vote will go, but some of the possible consequences.

I won’t try to persuade you to vote the same way as me. I won’t put the case for either side – plenty of other people are doing that (most of them rather badly). I will admit that it looks a pretty unappetising choice. Lesser of two evils. Devil or deep blue sea.

And it’s for this reason that I expect the great British public, however reluctantly, to opt in the end for the devil they know over the devil they don’t.

The opinion polls look close. They may well get closer still as the real poll approaches. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Leave supporters – currently still showing as the minority – actually take the lead in the last few days of campaigning.

We have precedence here, in the shape of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The Yes campaign, full of fervour, appeared to pull ahead right at the last. Until the day of decision, when the weary Noes dragged themselves off to the booths and cast their votes in favour of staying British.

The marriage survived. Just. And that’s what I expect to happen with Britain’s rocky marriage to mainland Europe.

If the democratic process had some way of measuring enthusiasm, there’s little doubt the Leavers would win. It’s easier to get fired up by the prospect of change than by merely retaining the status quo.

Which is why the voices calling for Scottish independence sounded louder than those for staying in the union. And it could be why the Leave campaign sounds louder now than those in favour of remaining European. That and all the noise generated by Boris Johnson.

But democracy counts heads, not what’s in them. Neither the degree of excitement nor the degree of intelligence, which are often two very different things.

So I expect David Cameron – who rather needlessly brought this whole thing upon us – to be breathing a huge sigh of relief on June 24 when the result’s declared. But he could, even then, find himself in “be careful what you wish for” territory.

For it may, in the end, not just be Britain’s relationship with Europe that’s at stake here, but Britain’s relationship with itself.

If there’s one part of the still-united-for-now kingdom where opinions seem pretty clear, it’s Scotland. The Scots want to stay in Europe – and not by a narrow margin. In England it’s a lot closer – too close to call with confidence but maybe leaning towards Leaving.

So what if the overall result is a vote to quit Europe – against the wishes of maybe 75 per cent or more of the Scots? That would certainly renew calls for Scottish independence. Calls that would be hard to resist.

And what would that mean for Wales, and for Northern Ireland?

The latest polls suggest Wales, even more than England, favours Brexit. Much as many Welsh people distrust Westminster politics, it seems they distrust Brussels still more.

In Northern Ireland, however, European investment has done more than anything to smooth over the old divides. The Troubles were always more about inequality than religion. It was just that the Haves went to one church, the Have-nots to another. Prosperity based on Brussels cash took the sting out. No wonder Ulster is the most pro-European region of the UK.

One result of a Brexit could be a reopening of the Irish question: Unionists in one corner, pro-Europe anti-Brits in the other. Potentially very nasty.

Now let’s look at it the other way. If the latest polls are right, the decision will be to stay in the EU. Which, according to Cameron, would put the matter to bed for a generation.

But there’s a but. It’s that England and Wales could vote Leave, but be kept in Europe by all those pro-European voters in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

That, in fact, is exactly what recent national and provincial surveys suggest will happen.

Will there then be a movement in England and Wales for independence from Scotland and Northern Ireland? Led, perhaps, by that apparent majority of East Anglians who want out of Europe?

There’s an awful lot of uncertainty here, but one thing seems certain. The rows and the wrangling – the custody battles, alimony fights and disputes over furniture – won’t be over on June 24. Whether the marriage survives or not.

Never mind that his personal approval rating, according to opinion polls, is the lowest of any current minister. After three years and eight months in the job, Jeremy Hunt is Britain’s longest-serving health secretary. Ever.

The record was held previously by Labour’s Alan Milburn, who was in the role from 1999 to 2003. He wasn’t exactly a roaring success either, though he didn’t make himself quite as unpopular with the mass of NHS staff as Hunt is.

But the point I’m trying to make isn’t about Hunt’s toxic relationship with Britain’s doctors. And it isn’t about his policy of privatising health care – a typical Tory policy that was actually begun by Milburn – though that does make me sick.

The striking thing about Hunt’s record is just how short a time 1,342 days is to be the longest anyone has been in one of the most important jobs in the land.

Heck, there are Premier League football managers who’ve been in their jobs longer than that. (Only two, admittedly. Bournemouth’s Eddie Howe is one. The other is Arsene Wenger, who has been Arsenal boss since Howe was a promising teenage player and Hunt had just given up trying to flog marmalade to Japan and set up a PR business.) But managing one club is pretty much like managing another. Unlike, say, being minister for culture and sport, Hunt’s previous post, and running the NHS.

And that shows up a crucial fact about our political system. You can’t really understand the peculiar British version of democracy until you grasp it.

It’s that ministers – of any party – are generally people who know little or nothing about whatever it is they are put in charge of.

When genial Jim Callaghan succeeded Harold Wilson as Prime Minister in 1976 he was said to be perfectly qualified for the job. He’d held all the other top government posts – Chancellor, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary – and been cheerfully, bumblingly out of his depth in all of them.

George Osborne’s been head honcho of the UK economy for five years, yet he appears to be less well qualified in maths than my 16-year-old daughter. In economics I out-rank him one A-level to nothing. On paper, anyway. One assumes he’s learned something on the job. And he is, of course, very rich, which must have taught him something about money. Though not the same something as struggling to make ends meet, which might have been a better qualification for handling austerity.

You thought the classic TV comedy Yes Minister was pure fiction. You thought the cynical ignoramus Jim Hacker, so delightfully and memorably played by Paul Eddington, was just a figment of someone’s comic imagination. In fact what made it so painfully funny was how close it was to reality.

The ignorance of ministers might be designed to enable civil servants – like Nigel Hawthorne’s slickly manipulative character Sir Humphrey – to get on with running the country. This may or may not be a good thing in practice.

But you can’t help wondering what it would be like if the top decision-making jobs were given to people who actually knew what they were doing.
 
 
 
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EDP reader Mark Houldey took to Twitter last week to publicise this blog. Which was kind of him.

Apparently he disagreed with my suggestion that Labour had not done as badly in the recent elections as most of the press – and especially the BBC – claimed. I was, he said “in full denial mode”.

It certainly seems one of us is. He and I are probably the two people least qualified to say which.

Whether he is a Tory, a member of Labour’s failed and disaffected right wing, or a BBC apologist, I couldn’t say. As for the verdict on Labour’s election performance it is a matter of opinion – and he is as entitled to his as I am to mine.

But I always like to back up my opinions with facts. And while social media has been awash with misleading statistics and graphics trying to support one side or the other, here are two facts that appear undeniable.

1. Labour got more votes and won more council seats than any other party on May 5.
   
2. It had a bigger share of the vote than in last year’s General Election, which rather defeats the claim that Jeremy Corbyn has wrecked the party's prospects.
   

Corbyn is untried, inexperienced at leadership level – even at ministerial, or shadow ministerial, level. He is, as far as one can tell, an unusually decent, honest and principled politician. Whether these rare and refreshing qualities will prove an advantage or a handicap in the long run, only the long run will reveal.

There’s (probably) a long way to go to the next General Election. A lot can happen in that time. It’s a bit early to say anyone’s staring yet at a 2020 disaster.

There is much talk in media-land that the Government wants to take greater control over the BBC. Some may think it appears to have too much control already.

The BBC is still the news provider most people trust most to give them the most objective, accurate news. It’s supposed to be impartial. But it isn’t, you know. And last week’s elections demonstrated the point with stark clarity – because they didn’t turn out the way Auntie wanted.

The build-up was all about how badly Labour was going to do at the polls. It was supposed to prove the point the BBC, along with most of the national media, has been making since last September. That Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable.

It was meant to be a disaster for the Left. You can be pretty sure that a number of Blairite Labour MPs were secretly hoping it would be. Bad enough to give them the ammunition to oust Corbyn and restore the party to the Tory-lite line. As if that had been such a roaring success a year ago.

The supposedly impartial BBC was not only predicting a Labour meltdown, it was doing its level best to help one along. 

It went to town on the story of Labour’s supposed anti-Semitism. Meanwhile it tried desperately to ignore news that the Electoral Commission and Crown Prosecution Service were investigating allegations of fraud by the Conservatives at last year’s General Election.

It took Channel 4 to dig that one up – so maybe the BBC was just reluctant to follow up a rival channel’s story. But it never seems to mind letting the Daily Mail set its news agenda. And since this investigation could, at least in theory, bring about a change of government, you might think it would rank as an important political story.
It’s all a bit tangled up in hard-to-understand rules and regulations. But just imagine what the media outcry would be if 24 Labour MPs were under similar suspicion.

Maybe that really would have made the party unelectable. By mid-morning Friday, however, as the actual results began coming in, the BBC was downgrading its description of Labour’s poll performance from “disastrous” to “disappointing”. Or, with the finest nuance it could put on it, “not as disastrous as expected”.

It was, one BBC reporter declared, “a dull election”. Not quite the hoped-for bloodbath, then.

So just how disastrous was it for the “unelectable” Corbyn’s party?

Eight years of Boris Johnson’s rule over London ended with a bus driver’s son decisively beating a billionaire businessman’s son to the mayor's office.

Sadiq Khan was up by 44 percentage points to 35 over Zac Goldsmith on the first round. When second preferences were called in, Khan had 57pc of the vote to Goldsmith’s 43pc, giving him the largest personal mandate any British politician has ever had.

Some disaster.

Labour also gained the mayoralty of Bristol and comfortably retained those of Liverpool and Salford.
In local council elections around the country, 1,291 Labour councillors were elected, as against 828 Tories. Labour was left in control of 57 councils, against the Tories' 38. Corbyn's party ended with 23 fewer council seats than before - but David Cameron's side lost twice as many. So whose disaster is that?

Labour’s firmer grip on Norwich City Council came at the expense of the Green Party, which could be seen as a Corbyn triumph. Many Green voters were former Labour supporters disenchanted with the party’s rightwards drift – now perhaps they have been drawn back to the fold by the party’s return to its traditional values.

Meanwhile there were two Parliamentary by-elections, both Labour holds. In Sheffield Brightside Labour increased their vote share by six per cent, taking well over 10 times as many votes as the Tory, who struggled in fourth. In Ogmore, south Wales, the Conservatives were pushed into third place by UKIP while Labour won with 52pc of the vote. 

Some disaster.

Labour retained control of the Welsh Assembly despite losing one seat – to Plaid Cymru, a party arguably slightly to Labour’s left. Not exactly a disaster, though Labour fell just short of an overall majority and will continue to need Plaid support in order to govern.

All of which left the BBC, and others, clinging to the Scottish Assembly election as fulfilment of the prediction of Labour disaster. But that, in a sense, is old news. It was at last year’s General Election that Labour was wiped out north of the border. 

And while the Conservatives can celebrate taking over from Labour as the official opposition in Holyrood, the SNP remains in charge, with Green Party support. And that’s a coalition well to the left of Labour. 

All of which adds up to a rather different message for Labour than the one their dissident MPs - and the BBC's current affairs department - would like us to believe.
 

I triggered a small social media storm earlier this week with my post about anti-Semitism. I haven't had so many hits on my blog - or been the recipient of so much hatred - since 2004, when I wrote in condemnation of 4x4 drivers. I haven't, as far as I know, had any death threats this time, but some of the vituperation has been quite fruity.

Many people agreed with my view that despising the policies of the Israeli government does not make you anti-Jewish. Others, inevitably, disagreed – and many did so rather vehemently.

I was repeatedly accused of two things in particular: ignorance and anti-Semitism.

Frankly, the level of abuse in some quarters might have been enough to bring out some anti-Semitic feeling, but for one thing. I’m Jewish.

And not a self-hating Jew, either, as I know I’ll be accused of being. I think that’s a category invented by the Israeli right wing and their supporters as a way of belittling and shouting down their Jewish opponents. Of whom there are many.

Like any form of self-identity, being Jewish is partly a matter of choice. My brother doesn’t think of himself as Jewish. I do. Being abused and spat on in the street can have that sort of effect.

We’re Jewish enough that the Nazis would have marked us out for extermination. Our one Jewish granny would have been enough.

On the other hand, we wouldn’t qualify for Israeli citizenship, even if we wanted it. It would have had to be the other granny for that. Institutional racism mixed with sexism would seem to be one way of keeping your democracy "pure".

But I’m proud of my great-great aunt Zhenya, who was a founder of the Jewish Workers’ Bund and translated Karl Marx into Russian. And I’m proud of my great-grandfather Isaac, who worked as a lawyer for the working-class Jews of New York and wrote in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward.

I’d be proud of Einstein, the artist Marc Chagall, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the Zionist Theodor Herzl (yes, really) and a host of other great people if that didn’t mean I’d also have to be ashamed of Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk.

As for my alleged ignorance, I wonder how many of my accusers have (and have read) long shelves of books on Jewish history and culture, as I have. (Sample of authors on the spines I can see from my desk: Eva Hoffman, Simon Schama, Roma Ligocka, Tony Michels, Eric Hobsbawm, Erich Haberer, Steven Cassedy, Ruth Ellen Gruber, Victor Klemperer, James Owen, D'Blossiers Tovey, Samuel Iwry, Miriam Weinstein, David J Goldberg, Paul Johnson, David Goldberg, IA Hourwich, Melech Epstein, Theo Richmond, Irving Howe, Abraham Cahan, Gustavo Corni, Leopold Haimson, Wladyslaw Szpilman, Milton Meltzer, Lucy Dawidowicz, Henry J Tobias, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Israel Joshua Singer, Evaldas Bakonis, Pauline Wengeroff, Elaine Feinstein, Anthony Rudolf.)

And I still think Netanyahu runs a vicious apartheid-style regime which – tragically – is one of the chief reasons anti-Semitism continues to flourish around the world.

Does the Labour Party have an anti-Semitism problem? Well, yes, undoubtedly it does. It’s a broadly based party whose members come from many parts of society – and society as a whole has a nasty strain of anti-Semitism running through it. At least Labour is prepared to admit it, and challenge it.

For complex historical reasons, Jewish people have been held responsible for capitalism, Communism and a great many other contradictory ills. But then, for many centuries Jewish people have been routinely blamed for almost anything somebody wanted to blame someone for.

They’re not the only ones. Throughout the 20th century – and it still goes on – poor white Americans were encouraged to blame their poor black neighbours for their troubles. It distracted them from looking for their real oppressors.

In exactly the same way, people in Britain and across Europe are encouraged now to blame innocent migrants or Muslims for troubles caused by governments.

And in exactly the same way, Tsarist Russia’s savagely oppressive ruling class turned the poor peasants on the Jews, most of whom were poor peasants themselves. The resulting wave of riot and murder in the 1880s and early 1900s led desperate Jews to seek a way out.

One way was the boat to America. Another was the idea of Zionism – that a “homeland” could be found in Palestine.

The idea was Utopian. It was based on the mistaken belief that no one was living there already. Or that both communities could rub along happily together in friendship and co-operation. And so the modern state of Israel had its origin.

It’s not anti-Semitic to believe that it was a great and tragic mistake.

And it’s not anti-Semitic to be appalled by the institutionalised racism of the Israeli government. Even if you accept – as I think you have to – that the state of Israel is a fact that can’t be wished away. Or transported to America.

Many Jews are appalled by the apartheid system brutally applied by Israel’s rulers. Many Israelis – sadly, not quite a majority – are equally horrified.

That vicious system, incidentally, should not be equated with Zionism, though many people - Ken Livingstone, for instance - get the two things muddled up. Most of the original Zionists would have been appalled to see what's now being done in their name - the idea was for equality, mutual tolerance and peaceful co-existence in a shared land, which doesn't seem such a bad idea.

In today's reality there are similarities between Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian citizens and the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews. It’s not the same – not by a long way – but there are clear parallels. And it’s not anti-Semitic to point that out.

Any more than it’s anti-British to side with the junior doctors in their dispute with the health secretary.

Like people the world over, I am often made angry or embarrassed by my country’s government. It doesn’t mean I hate my country, or its people.

Unhappily, though, opposition to Israeli policy is often mistaken for opposition to Jewish people generally.

Even more unhappily, the one often really does shade into the other. Which can make the two things difficult to tell apart. And that appears to be the problem afflicting Labour. Along with the destructive desire of one part of the party to bring down their elected leader by whatever means seem available.

There is another factor too. The Left’s natural sympathy for the oppressed – the sympathy which went out to Russian Jews a century ago and to German Jews in the 1930s – now goes out to the Palestinians.

It’s simplistic to see the Israeli conflict in straightforward black-and-white terms: “good” Palestinians versus “bad” Jews (or vice versa). Dangerously simplistic, whichever way round you look at it. The situation is more complex than that, the people more varied.

Unfortunately, simplistic and monochrome seems to be how most people look at most things most of the time.