This country is deeply, deeply screwed. Here’s the man in charge of negotiating Brexit admitting that he didn’t understand the significance of Dover. Presumably the existence of the English Channel (which has been around for the past 10,000 years) was dismissed as ‘Project Fear’ by him and the other hardline Brexit supporters. Watch the car crash here.

This is the level of intellect and understanding we’re seeing from Brexit supporters. It would be bad enough if this was just some bloke on the street. It’s not, It’s a Government Minister for God’s sake. Can you imagine the laughter this is going to provoke on the other side of that stretch of water Raab was clearly unaware of the significance of? Or in capitals around the world. Brexit has made the UK a laughing stock and it’s time we woke up to that fact. English arrogance is going to be our undoing…

This morning I woke up to the news that the Minister charged with leading us out of the EU, one David Davis, has resigned only a short while after the weekend at Chequers when the Government was meant to ‘unite’ around a negotiating position for Brexit. The cynic in me wonders if Davis, the man whom Dominic Cummings once described as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad and as vain as Croesus” couldn’t face the walk down the Chequers drive if he resigned then and had his Ministerial car taken off him.

To say that Brexit is a shambles is being kind. Shambles? It’s a train crash! After 2 years the Government managed to hammer out an agreement amongst itself that didn’t survive a weekend. What’s even more stupid is that agreement was never going to be acceptable to the EU, as the EU made clear years ago!

Meanwhile, whilst those determined to drag to UK over the edge of a hard Brexit cliff play out their games, more and more businesses warn of the consequences (the latest being Philips). What’s should be blindingly obvious by now is that – despite agitating for over 30 years for us to leave the EU, none of these Brextremists had a workable plan. When they finally (narrowly) got their wish, they hadn’t got the faintest clue what what to do next. Their only ‘plan’ is for the country to commit economic suicide by crashing out of the EU without a deal and then blaming the EU!

The arrogance and hollowness of the Brextremists claim that “they need us more than we need them” is plain. Not a single one of their claims has come to pass. The EU hasn’t blinked (it was never going to). Their threat to leave without a deal was always crass stupidity, the equivalent of pointing a shotgun at your own foot and saying “If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll pull the trigger. I’m serious!”

Meanwhile, the rest of us are caught up in this political (and economic) farce of epic proportions. Yet many people seem completely unaware of the consequences and dangers. They’re bored with Brexit. They just want the Government to “get on with it”, without having the faintest clue what ‘it’ is. Never has political apathy been so dangerous.

Sadly, my prediction from a couple of days ago that Parliament abdicating responsibility for democracy would speed up the brexodus has already come to pass. The juxtaposition of two headlines on the front page of today’s Times sums up Brexit perfectly.

We’re about to lose thousands of skilled jobs and £bns in revenue to the Exchequer if Airbus, but hey people, fruit picking isn’t as bad as you thought!

Airbus’s stark warning to the Government has been published on their website. You can find it here. This is part of it (with my highlights):

“Tom Williams, Chief Operating Officer of Airbus Commercial Aircraft, commented:
“In any scenario, Brexit has severe negative consequences for the UK aerospace industry and Airbus in particular. Therefore, immediate mitigation measures would need to be accelerated. While Airbus understands that the political process must go on, as a responsible business we require immediate details on the pragmatic steps that should be taken to operate competitively. Without these, Airbus believes that the impacts on our UK operations could be significant. We have sought to highlight our concerns over the past 12 months, without success. Far from Project Fear, this is a dawning reality for Airbus. Put simply, a No Deal scenario directly threatens Airbus’ future in the UK.”

Here’s a hollow laugh, remember when David Davis said this?

I don’t expect Airbus will be the last company to spell things out so starkly. Needless to say, the reaction of the Brexit fundamentalists has been complete denial. According to one on Twitter all we’ve got to do is ‘grow some balls’ (as opposed to them thinking with theirs) as apparently I’ve been ‘brainwashed’ by listening to experts!

Actually, this tweet sums up the reasons for the Brexit vote. It was the revenge of stupid people. But, because they’re stupid they’ve not had the brainpower to think the consequences through. It’s not the people they’re lashing out at who will be hurt the most, it’s them. The rich who funded and led the Leave campaign are already walking away to safety, carrying their Belizian diplomatic passports, or retiring to their villas in France or the Caribbean. Many others who have the option to leave will be doing so too as Brexit has created a poisoned country – as this tweet from Professor Tanja Bueltmann describes.

Who would have thought that a mature democracy could have been brought so low so quickly? We’re falling further into what’s looking more and more like a fascist state. I’ve always refrained from drawing parallels with Nazi Germany – until now, but now I think they’re too clear to ignore as the language is the same. A country where papers like the Mail can describe High Court judges as ‘traitors’, where MPs are afraid to vote with their conscience because of death threats and have to be escorted by SIX armed police. Where a Prime Minister can tell outright lies with a straight face on national TV (the Brexit ‘dividend’) is in deep, deep trouble. yet we seem to be sleepwalking over the edge of the cliff. Where’s the outrage at these things? Where’s the outcry? Where’s the push-back?This is how fascism takes over, when good people do nothing.

I fear for my country.