I take no pleasure in the nightmarish #BrexitReality now unfolding. But I am furious at the con artists, shysters, patriot hucksters, nationalists, Lexiters, and gloating journos who ignored all the warnings and allowed their country to be driven off a cliff. Unforgivable.

Time and time again they were warned what would happen to the economy, to businesses, to farmers, truck drivers, just in time supply lines. Again and again they sneered ‘Project Fear!’ Or they simply shrugged their shoulders and talked about WW2 or ‘sovereignty’.

Lexiters talked socialism in one country and called those who wanted to subject this calamity to a second vote as ‘second referendum fundamentalists’ or ‘anti-democratic’. They hitched a ride on a (far) rightwing nationalist project in the vague belief the left would benefit

Meanwhile two of the worst and most incompetent governments in UK history drove the country steadily towards the chaos that is now looming, urged on by No Deal/Lets go WTO zealots and Brexit Party zealots and charlatans.

Now we are just over three months from ‘Liberation Day’, and a clueless lying government has introduced a de facto border in Kent, and we are threatened with major disruption in supply chains, imports and exports at a time when the country is being battered by the pandemic.

So a new border in Kent. Another in the Irish Sea. And even Gibraltar wants to step away from us.

And we are, I fear, only at the beginning of a much steeper fall, because there are decisions that nations take that have real long term consequences and can’t be rowed back from

But as this terrible, disastrous act of self-harm unfolds, those who made it happen will blame everyone else except themselves. They will say it’s all the fault of the EU. Of Remainers who ‘didn’t get behind it’. Of ‘second referendum fundamentalists.’

We mustn’t let them get away with it. Otherwise we’ll have learned nothing. And regardless of what happens regarding the EU, we will have no chance of detoxifying our politics and becoming a better country again.