The number killed fighting in the war in Yemen jumped to 3,068 in November, the first time it has exceeded the three thousand mark in a single month since the start of the four-year conflict. This is about the same number as were being killed in Iraq at the height of the slaughter there in 2006.

The difference is that the Iraqis were not starving to death as is happening in Yemen. Aid organisations have long warned of mass starvation as 14m hungry people are on the verge of famine according to the UN. In a ruined economy, many Yemenis do not have the money to buy the little food that is available.

But at the last moment, just as millions of Yemenis were being engulfed by the crisis, a final calamity may have been averted.

On Thursday negotiators from the Saudi and UAE-backed forces and the Houthi rebel movement meeting under UN auspices in Sweden unexpectedly agreed a ceasefire in the port city of Hodeidah through which flows 70 per cent of Yemen’s food and fuel supplies. The Saudi-backed coalition forces and the Houthis have agreed to pull back their fighters from the city which the coalition has targeted has since June. It is the intensified fighting in and around Hodeidah that produced the spike in civilian and military fatalities.

The surprise breakthrough at the negotiations, which are meant to pave the way for full peace talks, has encouraging elements. Some 15,000 prisoners are to be exchanged and a humanitarian corridor is to be opened to the city of Taiz which has long been a focus for the fighting.

Truce agreements after long periods of fighting are always shaky as opposing fighters, locked in combat for years and regarding each other with the deepest suspicion, begin to disengage their forces. But, for once in Yemen, there are reasons for optimism, which have little to do with the warring parties themselves and everything to do with political changes in Washington and in the relations between the US and Saudi Arabia.

On the same day as the Hodeidah ceasefire was being announced in Sweden, the US Senate was unanimously approving a resolution holding Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – the architect of the war in March 2015 – accountable for the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul two months ago. Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and sponsor of the resolution, said: “I absolutely believe [Mohammed bin Salman] directed…I believe he monitored it. And I believe he is responsible for it.” Earlier in the month, after a closed-door briefing from the CIA director, Gina Haspel, Corker said: “If the Crown Prince had gone in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes.”

This is rough stuff and came in the wake of a 56 to 41 vote in the Senate for a resolution ending US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. The Senate is also demanding the release of political prisoners held for supporting peaceful reforms such as rights for women.

President Trump and the White House are still standing by Saudi Arabia, but they are paying an increasingly heavy price for this protection. Republican senators as well as Democrats are leading the attack on the Crown Prince and the Saudi role in Yemen. This assault is going to get worse for the Saudis when the newly-elected Democratic majority takes over the House next year and steps up the pressure on the administration over its close alliance with Saudi Arabia. Trump may find that at the end of the day he is more vulnerable over his Saudi connection than his links to Russia.

Even if Trump does go on protecting the Crown Prince and Saudi Arabia he will look for something substantive in return. This is likely to include an end to the Yemeni war which the US once supported, primarily as a favour to the Saudis. It is a clear sign that the balance of power between Washington and Riyadh has changed radically in favour of the former.

A less obvious reason why the war in Yemen may come to an end is that neither side is in a position to defeat the other side. Many in Saudi Arabia and its allies may have believed earlier this year that capturing Hodeidah would be a decisive blow against the Houthis, but this was always a misconception. The Houthis are expert and experienced guerrillas who would certainly fight on against the less capable Saudi-backed government forces. They may well see impending famine as strengthening them diplomatically because it will provoke greater international criticism of the Saudi intervention.

The war has always been seen as a personal project of the Crown Prince, which, as Defence Minister, he launched in March 2015 in expectation of a quick victory under the revealing code name “Operation Decisive Storm”. But instead of victory there was a military stalemate, though this did the Saudis little political damage until recently. They claimed with some success that their war was a counter-offensive against Iran and Western leaders and media commonly referred to the “Iranian-backed Houthi rebels”.

But Iranian support for the Houthis was always limited, reportedly consisting of free oil product delivered outside the country to the Houthis who then sold it for cash. It is a mistake to think that Iran or any other power in the Middle East necessarily needs to deliver arms and ammunition in crates. Much of the Middle East is a black-market arms bazaar and this has always been particularly true of Yemen. Anybody with money to pay for weapons will never lack an arms dealer willing to supply them.

After the Saudis failed to win the war quickly in 2015, they largely lost interest in it though they could not afford to bring it to an end without some sign of success. The human cost did not concern them as they were receiving military and diplomatic cover from the US, UK and France.

The international media shamefully paid little to the war until the Khashoggi affair: a measure of this lack of interest was the lazy way in which news outlets cited the number of Yemenis who had died violently in the conflict at just 10,000, quoting a two-year-old UN figure which was, in any case, an underestimate. It was only after the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) meticulously counted the number of those killed since January 2016, that it emerged that the true figure for fatalities was 60,223. ACLED estimates that, when it has counted the number of dead in the first year of the war, the overall figure will rise to between 75,000 and 80,000, not including those who have died from famine or disease.

Bizarrely, it was not the killing of these tens of thousands but the murder of one man, Jamal Khashoggi, which may help bring to a close one of the most unnecessary wars in history.

The number of people killed by the violence in Yemen has for the first time risen above 3,000 dead in a single month, bringing the total number of fatalities to over 60,000 since the start of 2016. The figure is six times greater than the out-of-date figure of 10,000 dead often cited in the media and by politicians.

“We have recorded 3,068 people killed in November, bringing the total number of Yemenis who have died in the violence to 60,223 since January 2016,” says Andrea Carboni, a researcher on Yemen for the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), formerly based at Sussex University, that studies conflicts and seeks to establish the real casualty level.

The figures do not include the Yemenis who have died through starvation or malnutrition – the country is on the brink of famine, according to the UN – or from illnesses caused by the war such as cholera.

This number of Yemenis dying in the war has been played down by the Saudi and UAE-led coalition, which has active military support from the US, UK and France, and has an interest in minimising the human cost of the conflict. The coalition has been trying since March 2015 to reinstate in power Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, whose government had been overthrown by the rebel Houthi movement in late 2014.

Mr Carboni says that ACLED’s latest figures, which were released on Tuesday, are drawn primarily from information in hundreds of online papers and news sites in Yemen. The possible political bias of these sources is taken into account and different reports are cross-referenced using the most conservative numbers, to arrive at the final number.

ACLED executive director Clionadh Raleigh says: “ACLED’s estimation of Yemen’s direct conflict deaths is far higher than official estimates – and [these are] still underestimated. Fatality numbers are only one approximation of the abject tragedy and terror forced upon Yemenis.”

The 60,223 figure for those killed in the fighting is lower than the total fatalities in Yemen since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began the Saudi intervention in March 2015 because ACLED only began its count at the beginning of 2016.

But the organisation is now also conducting a count of those killed in 2015, whom Mr Carboni says he estimated “to number between 15,000 and 20,000”. This would mean that the overall figure for fatalities as a result of violence over almost four years of war would rise to between 75,000 and 80,000.

The steep increase in the number killed this year is explained by the Saudi and UAE-led assault on the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast which is the main conduit for relief supplies reaching the Yemeni population.

This has led to a 68 per cent increase in the number killed in the first 11 months of this year, to 28,115, according to ACLED.

The number of those who have already died in Yemen may soon be far surpassed by the number likely to die because of hunger and disease. Some 20 million people are not getting enough to eat – 70 per cent of the population – and for the first time, 250,000 are facing “catastrophe”, according to the UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock, who has recently returned from Yemen.

He said that there has been “a significant, dramatic deterioration” of the humanitarian situation with those Yemenis facing starvation and death being concentrated in the four provinces where the fighting is at its most intense: Hodeidah, Saada, Taiz and Hajja.

A significant change in the conflict in Yemen is that the Saudi role in the war is coming under far greater scrutiny since the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi team in Istanbul on 2 October. International revulsion over his killing has led to greater focus and criticism of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the humanitarian calamity it has produced.

At the UN-sponsored talks between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government being held in Sweden, delegates are discussing the expansion of a shaky truce in Hodeidah. Under this proposal, all troops would withdraw from the city and later from the province, leaving the UN with oversight over an interim administration. The UN envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths, said he wanted “to take Hodeidah out of the war” so aid could be delivered.

Another sign of a limited de-escalation of the war came on Tuesday with the Saudi-backed government and the Houthis exchanging lists of some 15,000 prisoners to open the door for a swap agreement. But the talks, set to last until 13 December, have yet to make progress on important differences over a ceasefire at Hodeidah, reopening the Houthi-held airport at the capital Sanaa, and the shoring up of the central bank.

The prisoner swap would take place on 20 January via Sanaa airport in north Yemen and government-held Sayun airport in the south – a process overseen by the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“We have exchanged more than 7,000 names from each side, including some 200 high-ranking officers,” said Ghaleb Mutlaq, a delegate for the Houthis.

The Trump administration is paying an increasingly high political price at home and abroad for its continued support for the Saudi crown prince and the war in Yemen, which are coming under strong criticism from both Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

Nevertheless, the administration says it will continue to back the Saudi-led coalition, claiming that this is necessary to combat Iranian influence and Islamic fundamentalists.

“We do believe that support for the coalition is necessary. It sends a wrong message if we discontinue our support,” said Timothy Lenderking, US deputy assistant secretary for Arabian Gulf Affairs at the weekend.

The UK has long been divided by class, region and race, but these divisions have been masked by political and economic success. This has meant the English, as the dominant nation in the UK, are not good at coping with a sense of failure and a loss of self-confidence.

The current focus is on parliamentary turmoil and the acceptance or rejection of Theresa May’s muted version of Brexit but, whatever happens in the coming weeks, there will be no resolution of the overall crisis. On the contrary, the divisions exacerbated by Brexit will only get deeper and more toxic, dominating the national agenda to the exclusion of everything else.

The nature of English nationalism – deeply ingrained but so self-confident its norms were assumed by most English people to be part of the natural order of things – is changing. George Bernard Shaw said “a healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man is of his bones”. Smaller nations like the Irish and the Poles, with a history of defeat and occupation, have grim experience of having to nurse back to health the fractured bones of their nation but for the English worrying about their national identity and the future status is a new and unnerving experience.

The sense of English superiority was real but relaxed and often expressed in self-mockery. I remember my late brother-in-law Michael Flanders, part of the Flanders and Swann duo in the 1950s and 1960s, singing a song entitled Patriotic Prejudice, one version of which ran:

“The English, the English, the English are best,
I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.
The Germans are German, the Russians are red,
The French and Italians eat garlic in bed.
The English are moral, the English are good,
And clever and modest and misunderstood.”

Many pro-Brexit supporters do not seem to have advanced far beyond this benign picture of the national character. But these days their tone is defensive and self-assertive. Immigrants are to be schooled in British values – whatever those may be – the very thing Shaw saw as a symptom of unhealthy nationalism.

Analysis of the forces that led to Brexit usually looks at issues over too short a time span. The English may once have been confident of their own nationality but this does not mean they were as tolerant of others as they sometimes like to suppose. Punch cartoons in the 19th century showed the Irish as murderous sub-humans. The Aliens Act of 1905, brought in by a Conservative government with an eye to winning votes in a general election the following year, aimed to exclude Jews fleeing Russian pogroms. A century later, the Conservative Party spent years trying to trump Tony Blair’s ability to win successive elections by experimenting with different types of dog-whistle anti-immigrant rhetoric, often combined with demonisation of the EU.

Conservative politicians such as David Cameron, whose career was to be destroyed by the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, were highlighting the migrant threat a year before the vote, warning of “a swarm of people, coming from the Mediterranean, seeking a better life, wanting to come to Britain”. This showed real chutzpah, or cheek, since Cameron played a central role in launching the Nato war to overthrow Gaddafi in 2011 that turned Libya into a land of warlords and predatory militias, opening the way for migrants from North Africa to try to reach Europe from Libya in overcrowded boats and dinghies, often dying in the attempt.

A further feature of English nationalism will make it difficult to manoeuvre during the coming years of preoccupation with European relations. Small nations get used to inferior status and playing a weaker hand against opponents who hold most of the cards. British diplomats understand this, but a large part of public opinion in Britain, as in other former imperial nations, sees compromise as a sign of inexplicable weakness of will or as a treacherous stab in the back.

This lethal inability to calculate the real balance of power in the EU or anywhere else is not confined to an ill-informed public which has been spoon-fed war-time triumphs. Covering wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the last 20 years, I noticed again and again how difficult British politicians found it to take on board what was really happening and distinguish winners from losers, obvious though this often was.

A further English weakness – and the switch from referring to the English rather than the British is deliberate – is that neither Leavers nor Remainers have ever thought through what self-determination really means and how it can best be achieved. This is a perfectly legitimate aim that has inspired national movements in much of the world but Remainers tend to deride it as spurious patriotic bombast tinged with racism, and Leavers speak of achieving real independence for Britain almost automatically once the shackles of the EU are removed. This is in keeping with the behaviour of every nationalist or liberation movement in history which has invariably blamed all the woes of its people on foreign rulers or domestic tyrants. This conveniently saves them the trouble of having to explain what they would do themselves.

Britain could achieve a greater degree of formal self-determination outside the EU, though everybody in the country would be considerably poorer. But it would not be as a free trading entrepot like Singapore or Dubai: political and economic isolation for any country usually leads to the state playing a greater role. This is already happening in a small way in Britain with the Department of Health arranging uninterrupted supplies of medicine in case Britain topples out of the EU next year without an agreement.

A contradictory aspect of the Brexiteer project is fanaticism about freeing Britain from EU courts and regulations. At the same time, Leavers are relaxed about British water companies and other essential utilities being owned by financiers in Sydney, Hong Kong and anywhere else in the world.

As Shaw pointed out, national self-confidence is not something that you notice until it is gone and it is then difficult to win back. The same is true of national unity: the obvious fallacy that the British as a whole chose to leave the EU, when the vote was so evenly divided, could only end in a self-destructive crisis. To expect such a revolutionary change to be carried out by a minority government was demented. Whatever happens in the coming months and years, the English nationality will have to mend a lot of broken bones.

The anniversary of the sinking of two great capital ships off Singapore, one of the great British defeats of the Second World War, falls unnoticed between the proposed May-Corbyn debate on 9 December and the House of Commons vote on the Brexit agreement with the EU on 11 December. This is a pity because the miscalculations that go into producing first rate disasters, both political and military, have a lot in common.

Seventy-seven years ago, on 10 December 1941, Japanese planes found and sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulsewhen they unwisely sailed north of Singapore without air cover in a bid to attack the Japanese forces invading Malaya. Describing his reaction to the sinking, in which 840 sailors died, Churchill said: “In all the war, I never received a more direct shock.”

The ingredients that led to this naval calamity were similar in general terms to those producing most disasters: inadequate resources for the task in hand, over-optimistic assessment of the risks, and self-destructive ignorance of the obstacles to be faced. The two ships went to their doom because the British had no more forces to send and underestimated the threat of Japanese air attack.

Supporters of Britain leaving the EU will bristle and say that it is far too apocalyptic to draw any parallel between a military reverse in the last century and Brexit today. They will say that this is one more exaggerated example of “Project Fear” and “Project Hysteria”, and all that is needed is to keep our nerve and exercise greater willpower until those EU leaders and negotiators come running, because they know that their countries would lose out, though not as much as the UK, from a failure to reach an agreement.

This optimistic view suffers from a profound and deeply damaging lack of understanding about what is really at stake as Britain fumbles its way towards the EU exit door. Rational debate on the EU in Britain has been hobbled for years, because it is conducted in terms of economic advantages and disadvantages with talk focusing on issues like single markets and custom unions, tariffs and those magical free trade agreements we are to sign with countries hungering for British goods and services.

But the EU is, and has always been, primarily a political rather than an economic organisation. This has been true since 9 May 1950 when the French politician Robert Schumann made his proposal for the French-German Coal and Steel Community out of which the EU was to develop. The purpose of the Schumann plan was to bind France and Germany together, but the British at that time – and up to the present day – had great difficulty in taking this on board. They have always exaggerated the extent to which the EU is about fostering free trade and economic prosperity.

The nature of the EU, the primacy of politics over economics, made Brexiteer hopes of German carmakers and industrialists pressuring their government to keep access to British markets to be so disappointingly unrealised. The quasi-democratic trappings of the EU, whereby its 27 members appear to have an equal voice, is deceptive. If Germany, France and the EU core members want something then they are going to get it and Britain is going to be over-matched, regardless of whether or not it is inside or outside the union. The outcome of the Brexit negotiations have simply underlined the extent to which the balance of power is skewed against Britain.

The myth preached in Britain down the decades that Brussels is an all-powerful behemoth has led people to underestimate the degree to which Europe is a continent of nation states bound together in a treaty-based alliance dominated by Germany and France.

The French see the revolutionary nature of what Britain is proposing to do more realistically than the British themselves. An article in Le Figaro by Adrien Jaulmes goes to the heart of what is happening, saying that “the UK has built its power on two principles: keep the British Isles united and the European continent divided. Today it is close to succeeding in doing the opposite.”

Jaulmes goes on to cite with approval Jo Johnson’s denunciation of the Brexit venture as a failure of British statecraft not seen since the Suez crisis in 1956. Unfortunately, it is a much more serious failure than Suez where the crisis was short in duration, underlining the self-evident fact that Britain could not launch wars opposed by nationalist forces against the wishes of the US.

Other peacetime crises cited as comparable to Brexit, such as the Ulster Crisis of 1912-14 or going off the gold standard in 1931, do not approach Brexit in terms of long term impact. Only wartime calamities like the loss of the Prince of Walesand Repulse, and the British defeat in Malaya that followed soon thereafter, are really similar to Brexit in terms of the damage done to the British state. To quote Churchill again, the Malayan campaign was “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.

A further reason for drawing an analogy between Brexit and wartime disasters is that there is a gratifying but false belief by the British that they flourish in times of disaster. But the disasters usually cited as examples of national robustness at dark moments are usually not that disastrous. Gallipoli and Dunkirk, both heroic failures but not total defeats, are remembered, but not Mesopotamia, where in the First World War 100,000 British and Indian troops were killed or wounded, or Malaya where 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops were taken prisoner by a smaller Japanese force in 1941-42.

There is nothing surprising about this. What nation anywhere in the world wants to advertise its defeats? But the British differ from other Europeans in having a positive collective memory of the Second World War which is ceaselessly massaged by books and television. The past gains a golden glow, far from reality, which fuels a comfy belief that predictions of disaster are either exaggerated or a malign effort to generate fear and sabotage the whole glorious Brexit project. It is difficult to imagine a cast of mind more likely to produce frustration and failure.

When a majority of the British people voted to leave the EU in 2016, I was struck by the similarity between the Brexiteers’ plans for their perilous voyage and those of Edward Lear’s characters in The Jumblies as they set to sea in their sieve. The analogy became more apt as the proponents of Brexit showed that they did not know nor care very much about the nature of the world into which they were proposing to sail other than to hope that everything would be alright on the night.

The Jumblies, like the Brexiteers, were swift to dismiss critical comment predicting a disastrous end to their venture, saying: “Our sieve ain’t big / But we don’t care a button, we don’t care a fig! / In a sieve we’ll go to sea!”

The water did indeed come in, but the Jumblies were not downhearted “because they wrapped their feet / in pinky paper all folded neat”. For extra safety, they pass the night in a crockery jar where they sang of their wisdom as they set their pea-green sail for lands where, among other things, they secured an owl, a pig and some green-Jack-daws, and “a lovely monkey with lollipop paws”.

The Brexiteers’ alternative to the EU is just as imaginary as that described by Lear as a habitation for the Jumblies. The reason why the Leavers have failed to negotiate the sort of settlement they said they wanted from the EU is simple: what they said in 2016 was based on the proposition that the EU got more out Britain than Britain got out of the EU. Had this been true, the British departure would be easy enough, because Britain could genuinely have threatened to walk away. But because Britain needs the EU more than vice versa, the outcome of the negotiations were always going to be heavily skewed in favour of Brussels.

Yet this simple proposition evidently eluded Dominic Raab, David Davis, Boris Johnson and the other Leavers who departed from the cabinet claiming that Britain was being blackmailed and bullied into submission. Successful negotiations always reflect the balance of power between the negotiating parties and it is puerile to believe that the settlement, which the EU leaders will or will not agree to in the next few days, was determined by a failure of will by Theresa May or subtle treachery by Remain-sympathising civil servants.

It is easy and right to deride the Leavers for their wishful thinking and inability to calculate the true balance of power between Britain and its neighbours. This is the same ruinous mistake made by so many populist-nationalist leaders down the decades. The great flaw of nationalists everywhere is an assumption that their nation has greater political, economic and military potential – and their rivals less – than is really the case.

Exaggerated ideas of national superiority have fuelled the most self-destructive policy mistakes of modern European history. They led to France declaring war on Prussia in 1870 and Germany choosing to fight wars on two fronts in both World Wars. American and British leaders blithely intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq this century in total ignorance of the real odds against their success.

Such military examples are apposite because Britain’s withdrawal from the EU is the equivalent of a major defeat in war. Suppose, hypothetically, that Britain fought and lost a military conflict with a rival European power, then the departure of Britain from the EU might well be demanded by the victor as a way of ensuring that Britain was permanently weakened.

What foreign enemies failed to accomplish against the British state for centuries may soon be inflicted by the modern day Jumblies. Negotiations now completed are at best an attempt to mitigate the extent of the British loss and all scenarios point to a country less well-off and influential than if it had stayed in the EU.

The best argument for Brexit has little to do with political power or economic success. The demand for national self-determination has been behind the most progressive developments in the world over the last century since the break-up of the German, Austro-Habsburg and Ottoman empires after 1918, and the British and French empires after 1945.

Newly emergent nation states invariably blame former imperial masters for their economic, political and social troubles. Usually there is a lot in this claim, though not as much as the claimants pretend. In this context, there is nothing surprising in the fact the British complaints against Brussels echo those made by the Irish and the Indians against London when they fought, with rather more reason, for their independence.

This comparison will not appeal to hardcore Leavers because of their nostalgia for a state of the world at home and abroad that, if it existed at all, was briefly present in the 1950s. British society of that era may have some aspects that were superior to the present, as well as many that were worse, but in either case they lie in the past and cannot be recreated.

One of the many weird characteristics of the Leave leaders is their frequent references to a mythical version of British history, featuring “vassalage” and humiliating treaties signed by King John at the beginning of the 13th century. One Brexiteer even attacked the proposed EU agreement as the most humiliating since Charles II agreed the Treaty of Dover with Louis XIV in return for a heavy subsidy in 1670.

But these historical nuggets are really only there for adornment. For all the talk about “Britain standing alone”, Britain invariably made every effort to do no such thing. British success against Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler were based on the Royal Navy preventing defeat, while Britain built up overwhelmingly powerful alliances against the enemy of the day. The last time the country was as bereft of continental allies as it is today was during the American War of Independence at the end of 18th century.

Contemporary English populist nationalism has much in common with similar movements in Europe and the US: hostility to immigrants and minority communities combined with a sense of lost identity and control, which seems to be the inevitable consequence of globalisation.

For globalisation in this century is turning out to be as destructive to the political and social status quo as the Industrial Revolution was in the 19th century. Metropolitan areas, primarily urban, that are plugged into the global economy do well, while everybody else falls behind or does badly. The same pattern is repeated everywhere from Arkansas to the Isle of Thanet and from Saxony and the rural hinterland of Damascus.