The impending fall of the British Prime minister, Mr David Cameron (who has announced that following the result of the referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union or depart from it, he will leave office in October 2016) can be traced to a miscalculation on his part.

Mr Cameron assumed that the “sweet victory” his Conservative Party had achieved in the general election of 7 May 2015, meant that his Party had become so popular that the electorate would give him another mandate if he asked for it.

So, only one year after the election, he asked British voters to approve, in a referendum, his proposal that Britain should stay in the European Union. Now, it is said that “one week is a long time in politics”.

If that is so, then one year is a veritable eternity! Mr. Cameron has just found out about this.

I think he allowed the triumph of the 2015 electoral victory to wear thin rather quickly, because it induced him to provide too much room for his friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to destroy many of the relatively enlightened social policies pursued — with near-consensus — by most of the Governments that have held power in Britain since the Second World War.

Churchill, Macmillan, Heath and even Thatcher did not assault the welfare state in the red-toothed manner in which Osborne has been going about the business of “cutting” benefits and allowances.

Osborne, a rather inflexible man, comes across as an unfeeling, class-conscious politician, who would, if allowed, erase every social gain that had Britain the envy of the world. For instance, Americans, the richest people on earth, have no health insurance system comparable to what is enjoyed by Britons.

Osborne has cut the money given to employing those including health-care professionals — who look after the old and the infirm.

He has also made it more difficult for the unemployed to claim “benefits” that help them with their rent payments and other living expenses. Indeed, he has made so many cuts in the health budget that health authorities across the land have been forced to resort to practices that have diminished the efficiency of some of the country’s top-rank hospitals.

Junior doctors recently went on strike in opposition to revised service conditions that were being foisted on them, which, they said, were dangerous to the safety of the patients placed under their care. They had the support of the General Medical Council — a body largely regarded to be conservative and unconfrontational.

Now, at a general election, several factors come into play – for instance, in the 2015 election, the top-rate “uncharismatic personality” of the then Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, was ruthlessly exploited by the Tory media, to persuade the electorate that he would not be a fit person to represent Britain abroad! But in a referendum, such tactics cannot be usefully employed.

The question, does Britain stay in Europe or leave, does not allow for the display or otherwise of “glamour”! The people answering the question included the aged and the infirm; the unemployed and other sectors of society who blamed Osborne for making life more difficult for them.

That’s largely why the electorate clobbered David Cameron. They did so largely, one suspects, in order to get rid of Osborne too. But, admittedly, that’s not the whole story.

The “Brexit” lot (that is, the people who wanted Britain to leave the European Union) played on the fear of Britons that their island would soon be swamped with “immigrants” from the less affluent members of the European Union. With all the British television networks showing, day after day after day, heart-rending pictures of would-be “immigrants” from Syria and Africa, who were either pathetically drowning in the sea or being rescued from rickety boats, the words “immigrants” and “economic migrants” became emotionally-charged in the UK.

Saturation coverage of immigration issues conveyed the vista of unpleasant neighbours even to people who would normally consider themselves liberal-minded or even humanitarian. The “Brexit” campaigners used racist code-words to hammer the “immigrant” question again and again, and neither Cameron nor Osborne was able to counter their arguments with any real conviction – probably because at heart, they were in agreement with the “Brexit” on that issue.

“Nimbyism” (the desire not to harbour ‘ undesirables’ “in my backyard”) triggers a subconscious against foreigners that is difficult to repress. No wonder it is being widely speculated that the leading proponent of anti-immigration policies – the “Nimby” former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson – will replace David Cameron as Prime Minister when Cameron leaves the scene in three months time.

Meanwhile, the economic consequences of the “Leave” Europe result are already being felt in the UK. The London Financial Times, in an editorial, has described the situation created by the referendum result as “the pitchfork moment”.

And indeed, what as also been termed the “Brexit bloodbath”, did send global stock markets into free fall. In just four hours of trading, the main London index, the “FTSE 100”, was down about 8% before recovering to just under 5%. In the US, Dow Jones industrial average futures were off by about 500 points, or roughly 2.7%, ahead of the opening bell in New York.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also looked set to plunge downwards by 3.5%. (The U.K. is America’s seventh biggest trading partner and so the US is inevitably affected by economic developments in the UK.) Britain’s other big trading partners, Germany, and France, also took hits, with Frankfurt’s DAX Index down 7.3p% while the CAC in Paris fell by 8.7%. The British pound took a beating, falling against the dollar by nearly 8% at one stage.

No-one knows what its future value against the dollar will be. Socially, the referendum result looks set to take Britain back to the realm of “Little England”, with xenophobia given its head because politicians discern that it can attract votes for them.

But Britain will pay dearly for this in economic terms, because such policies will drive the larger European-based companies that are littered all over the “City” of London, to Paris and Germany or even Brussels, where they will continue to be assured of larger markets and the freedom to travel where they want, at a moment’s notice, without needing visas. British house prices will fall if this happens on a large scale because much of the housing boom in the UK — especially London — is fuelled by the business elites who use London as their main base, while jetting around the world to do deals on behalf of their companies.

In view of all this, the term, “self-harm”, has been applied frequently to what the British have done to themselves on the EU question. And it could well turn out to be the right term.