One of the most infuriating things about covering this interminable Brexit shambles is the stultifying 'groupthink' that infests the Remain movement.
It's impossible to count the number of times I've been insuted and accused of being a Brexiteer for questioning the strategy of investing so much time and effort in demanding an incredibly risky "another roll of the dice" referendum with the Tories still in power, and nothing whatever having been done to clamp down on electoral cheats, political liars, and social media dark ads since Remain lost the previous referendum in 2016.
Despite all the smears and abuse from the 'groupthink' mob I actually hold a significantly firmer stance against the Brexit chaos than a lot of them seem to, believing that Article 50 should be revoked (as per the ECJ ruling that the UK can revoke it at any time) and that another referendum should only ever be held under a specific set of circumstances:
1. The Brexiteers must come up with a detailed manifesto detailing how they would seek to implement Brexit (Single Market? Customs Union? Protection of workers' rights? Protection of environmental laws? Consumer protections? Security co-operation? Negotiating objectives for a post-Brexit trade deal with the EU. Plans for the Irish border issue. What if Scotland vote's against it again? ...) that they can be held to account on.
2. Electoral laws must be strengthened to clamp down on electoral cheats and liars with substantial fines, bars from political office, and jail terms for the worst offenders.
3. New regulations must be introduced to clamp down on social media dark ads.
The problem of course is that the trendy Remainer 'groupthink' is to continue demanding another referendum now, so my views that the absolute priority should be preventing a catastrophic "no deal" meltdown, and that another referendum with undefined options on the ballot is an insanely risky strategy are considered unacceptable thought crime by a significant swathe of Remainers, who spit hate at me and even accuse me of being a Brexiteer because I won't mindlessly go along with the insanely risky gamble that they insist is the best approach.
However with the impending prospect of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, surely it would be sensible for these another referendum now advocates to accept that their dream of a do-or-die, clash of civilisations culture war of another referendum is becoming vanishingly unlikely, and stop throwing even more energy and resources into demanding something that's just not going to happen?
But "sensible" just isn't in a lot of these people's natures.
From their spreading of delusional fantasies that pre-2016 Britain was some kind of magnificent utopia, to spitting hate at people who are even more sceptical about Brexit than they are for the heresy of thinking that an "another roll of the dice" referendum with the Tories still in charge is actually a terribly risky idea; from refusing to critique austerity and its living standards-trashing role in causing the Brexit backlash in the first place, to arrogantly sneering at left-behind communities like Morecambe; a lot of this behaviour is strategically inept, dangerously counter-productive, and about as far from "sensible" as it's possible to get.
And "sensible" simply doesn't take into account the sunk costs fallacy either.
In order to switch from Another referendum now to Revoke Article 50 and no more undefined options on ballots ever they'd have to admit that huge amounts of the time and effort they expended on their People's Vote hysteria were essentially wasted, when they should have seen sense months ago and switched to Revoke Article 50 after it become absolutely obvious that Theresa May and the Tories had made an absolute mess of the Brexit negotiations.
Even though the looming spectre of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister by default means their another referendum now objective is further away than it's ever been, the temptation for them will obviously to continue chucking away even more time, effort, and resources rather than admit that it was a mistake, and move on to a more coherent and less risky strategy.
You only need to look at how the Brexiteers have worked tirelessly to move away from the "we can be like Norway" and "only a madman would quit the Single Market" positioning of the 2016 referendum to the "no deal" militancy of today to understand that Brexit-sceptics need to adopt an equally firm position in response in the face of this ever intensifying ideological fanaticism.
If you're absolutely set against any kind of Brexit compromise as a strategy to ensure that a ruinous "no deal" meltdown can't happen, then you really need to take something solid into the culture war you're determined to provoke, rather than some pathetic wishy-washy "let's play again in the rigged game we lost at last time" nonsense.
Brexit-sceptics shouldn't be demanding a re-roll of the dice under the exact same circumstances they lost the last time, they should be demanding revocation of Article 50 because of the unbelievably shambolic mess the Brexiteers have made of their own damned project, and stipulations to ensure that any future referendums are conducted fairly, and with clearly defined options rather than vague objectives on the ballot.
Anything less is just doomed-to-fail weakness in the face of the extreme ideological militancy of "no deal" fanaticism.
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It's one historic humiliation after another for Theresa May, but she just keeps clinging onto power.
Last week it was having her government become the first in history to be found in contempt of parliament over their efforts to hide the legal advice they received on her Brexit proposals.
Today it's the postponement of the meaningful vote on her Brexit proposals purely because she wants to avoid the humiliation of losing it.
Make no mistake, the meaningful vote was set be one of the most significant parliamentary votes of the Century given that the outcome defines our entire future relationship with our European neighbours.
She's not just bottled any old parliamentary vote because she's afraid of losing it (which would be a humiliation in its own right), she's bottled the single most important parliamentary vote of her entire tenure as Prime Minister!
The self-serving cowardice of it is absolutely extraordinary. Her government spent the last few weeks talking up the importance of the vote and fear-mongering terrible outcomes if she doesn't get her way (cynically threatening a ruinous "no deal" Brexit to Brexit-sceptics, and a "no Brexit" scenario to the Brexiteers), but when it came to the crunch she just shifted the goalposts to some unspecified date in the future, solely to avoid defeat.
The fact that she's cynically moved the date of the vote at the last minute for her own personal advantage just proves what a ruthlessly self-serving and manipulative charlatan she is.
Let's be clear. She's not delayed the vote for any reason other than her own self-interest.
She knew that if she lost the vote she'd have been left with no choice but to step down and let someone else have a go at fixing the Brexit chaos David Cameron lumbered us with when he decided to gamble the entire future of the nation in order to grub a few thousand votes off UKIP at the 2015 General Election, but she desperately wants to cling onto power for as long as possible.
It's clearly in the national interest to get the vote out of the way, clear Theresa May's lamentable proposals off the table, and do it in good time for someone else to have a go at figuring out how to deal with this absolute Tory chaos before the Article 50 notification expires on March 29th.
The European Court of Justice ruling says that the UK can unilaterally withdraw Article 50 without fear of retribution from the EU, and anyone claiming that the EU wouldn't allow an Article 50 extension to renegotiate once Theresa May and her bad faith threat-based negotiating tactics are out of the way is talking absolute rubbish too.
But Theresa May insists on defying the national interest by shamelessly clinging onto power for as long as she can get away with.
The really sad thing is that this kind of self-serving chaos was always inevitable with an incompetent wannabe-tyrant like Theresa May running the show. Yet when she presented the nation with a fantastic opportunity to get rid of her with her 2017 hubris election, 13.7 million people flocked to the polls to give her the biggest Tory turnout since John Major's 14 million in 1992!
And as a consequence we all have to sit here and watch her shamelessly clinging onto power for as long as possible when everyone (Remainers, Brexiters and everyone in between) can see that it's clearly now in the national interest for her to put her own self-interest aside, let her shambolic and astoundingly unpopular Brexit plan fail, and let someone more capable have a go at tidying up this outrageous Tory Brexit mess.
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To get a measure of how utterly normalised we've become to Tory lawlessness, just consider the fact that they became the first government in UK history to be held in contempt of parliament for deliberately refusing to comply with a parliamentary vote to release the legal advice they received on Brexit, and it's already been forgotten about within days.
This is always the case. Tory lawlessness and contempt for democracy always gets swept under the carpet and forgotten about.
- Remember when Theresa May and the Tories were defeated in the Supreme Court over their efforts to completely sideline parliament in order to make democratic opposition to Theresa May's hard-right Brexit scheming impossible?
- Remember when the Tories absolutely gutted Legal Aid in order to price poor and ordinary people out of the justice system and make it almost impossible for the victims of their malicious and unjust welfare policies to seek justice in the courts?
This is a government riddled with contempt for parliamentary democracy and contempt towards the rule of law, yet they're barely ever held to account for it by the mainstream media. And on the rare occasions that the public do actually hear about these extraordinary scandals, the tendency is to shrug it all off as if lawlessness, corruption and contempt for democracy are normal and unavoidable, rather than outrageous and unacceptable.
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"May's Finest Hour" blares the front page of the Express, while the S*n and Daily Mail also carried similarly delusional interpretations of Theresa May's humiliation at Salzberg.
From the moment her Chequers Plan was released it was always going to come to this.
Theresa May was warned time and again that her effort to threaten the EU into letting her cherry-pick the benefits of EU membership without shouldering any of the responsibilities was doomed to failure.
But she carried on regardless, in the desperate hope that her endlessly repeated threat to launch a mutually destructive "no deal" flounce if she isn't given her way would frighten the EU negotiators into caving in to her demands.
Then the Tories made yet another one of the glating strategic errors that have plagued the party ever since David Cameron's time as PM. They decided to defy the mainstream EU consensus by aligning themselves with all of the extreme-right, neo-Nazi, and Europhobic parties in the European Parliament to oppose a move to censure the vile anti-Semitic, judiciary-rigging, free speech repressing Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán.
This Tory tactic was intended to divide the EU27 by getting the hard-right Hungarian and Polish governments onside, but it backfired spectacularly as this disgustingly cynical move pissed off the EU negotiators to such an extent that they finally put their foot down at Salzberg.
Having her desperately unrealistic wish list publicly rejected was clearly a humiliation for Theresa May and a humiliation for Britain, yet the right-wing propaganda rags are celebrating this shameful farce as some kind of wonderful victory.
This reality-reversal is so transparent that comparisons with Orwell are inevitable. So let's just get it out of the way. "Humiliation is Victory" easily fits in alongside the 1984 slogans "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery" and "Ignorance is Strength".
How on earth did we get to this point?
- How did we allow Theresa May to trigger Article 50 without even having drawn up a proper negotiating tactic first?
- How did we allow Theresa May to inhibit the chance of ever getting a workable Brexit by scribbling "red lines" all over the place?
- How did we allow Theresa May and the Tories to sideline the House of Commons, UK businesses, trade unions, civic society, opposition parties, devolved parliaments, charities ... to run the whole Brexit show themselves?
- How did we allow Theresa May and the Tories to present the shockingly unrealistic Chequers Plan as some kind of negotiating triumph, rather than an absolute shambles that doesn't even satisfy the Tory party that developed it, let alone the rest of the UK, or the EU negotiators who quite understandably shot it down in Salzberg after the Tories defied the mainstream European consensus to side with Viktor Orbán.
The answer to all of this is obvious. It's the toxifying influence of the right-wing propaganda rags. They promoted Brexit when they knew the Brexiteers had no plan for how to achieve it.
They celebrated Theresa May's ridiculous red lines, her toddler-tantrum negotiating tactics, and her decision to trigger Article 50 with no negotiating plan.
They attacked the judges as "enemies of Britain" when they overruled Theresa May's efforts to sideline parliament and tried to orchestrate an ideological witch hunt of academics who dare to question or critique the Brexit process.
They triggered cascades of Brexiteer death threats every time they called the remain-oriented Tories "mutineers" and "traitors". They did nothing to hold Theresa May and the Brexiteers to account over their ridiculous time-wasting tactics. And now they're presenting Theresa May's inevitable humiliation as some kind of epic triumph!
And if they're prepared to reverse reality in order to re-write Theresa May's humiliation into a wonderful victory, don't doubt that there's no lengths these propagandists won't go to in order to con people into continuing to support Tory misrule, even when it's ludicrously obvious that they're lying through their teeth.
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In March 2017 I wrote a blog post highlighting the fact that the Tories were openly admitting that they had done absolutely no impact assessments into the social and economic effects of a "no deal" cliff edge Brexit before they decided to make the threat of it the absolute centrepiece of their so-called negotiation position with their "no deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric.
By the summer the Tories and the Brexit minister David Davis had changed their tune completely. Davis took to claiming that there were between 50 and 60 detailed sectoral analyses into the economic impact of Brexit.
When quizzed about whether Theresa May had read these Brexit impact assessments by the Brexit Select Committee, David Davis claimed that they contained "excruciating detail", but that she would have read the executive summaries.
In early November the opposition parties won a vote to force the Tories to hand over the Brexit impact assessments to the Brexit Select Committee so that they could scrutinise the different impacts of the various different Brexit scenarios.
Since then the Tory government have been stalling and stalling on handing over these impact assessments, despite being threatened with contempt of parliament by the speaker John Bercow if they don't.
And then on the morning of December 6th 2017 David Davis decided to tell the Brexit Select Committee that there are actually no Brexit impact assessments on any sector of the UK economy.
This clip is extraordinarily difficult to square with Davis' previous assertions that Theresa May had read the executive summaries of these excruciatingly detailed reports that don't exist.
It makes an interesting though experiment to consider the nature of these Schrödinger's impact assessments which both exist in excruciating detail and also don't exist at all according to David Davis, but the bigger issue here is that the man has clearly exposed himself as a profoundly dishonest charlatan.
He was either lying when he claimed that Theresa May has read the executive summaries of these reports, or he's lying that they don't exist simply because he doesn't want anyone to read them because they project a catastrophic economic meltdown if Brexit goes ahead.
Brexit is the single most complex and risky process the UK has undertaken in decades, and David Davis is now expecting us to believe that the Tories have done no research into the potential consequences whatever.
He expects us to just accept that they've wasted 18 months since the EU referendum result on a shambolic "let's make it up as we go along" Brexit strategy, without even considering the economic impact of what they're actually doing.
This admission from David Davis should be the final nail in the coffin for the myth of Tory economic competence.
Let's forget the fact that those who propagandised in favour of Brexit should have presented social and economic impact studies before the EU referendum to convince us of their case, and just focus on the fact that even after Brexit they've had 18 months to research the consequences of their actions, and they've done nothing.
How can they ever pretend to be competent guardians of the British economy again when they're now admitting that they've spent 18 months on Brexit without doing a single study into the impact on any area of the UK economy (the financial sector, aviation, the automotive industry, manufacturing, agriculture, retail, the health service, fishing, hospitality, tourism, any of it!)?
Millions of people ignored the fact that the Brexiteers had no plan and no impact studies to justify their case and voted in favour of Brexit regardless, but surely now they must be having second thoughts given the fact that the Tories have openly admitted wasting 18 months, and even triggering Article 50 without even bothering to do any analysis on the possible consequences beforehand.
How can anyone, no matter what their views on EU membership, look at this extraordinarily reckless Tory shambles and not be deeply concerned about it?
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Ever since the EU referendum Brexiteers have continually promoted the myth that Brexit is not going to be a disaster because the "project fear" predictions of the Remain campaign supposedly didn't come true after the referendum.
The main problem with this myth of course is that the predictions of an economic downturn have largely proven quite accurate since the Brexit vote.
It's clear that what has actually happened to the economy in the wake of the Brexit vote actually lies pretty much in the middle of what the various Brexit forecasts predicted (see image).
It's also worth remembering that many of the pre-Brexit forecasts were built on the (somewhat naive) assumption that David Cameron would stick to his word and trigger Article 50 on the day after a Leave vote.
So when Cameron didn't actually do that, he dramatically softened the immediate economic impact of Brexit by deferring a significant measure of the economic damage (thus helping to generate the seemingly ubiquitous 'Brexit isn't so bad' trope).
Even though Cameron handed the Brexiteers a huge propaganda boost by renageing on his empty threat to trigger Article 50 on the day after the EU referendum, the Brexit vote still caused a significant measure of economic damage.
The immediate slump in the value of the Pound took time to filter through to millions of ordinary British workers through rising inflation, but those who live, study, or have business elsewhere in the EU suffered an immediate 10%-15% collapse in their living standards (think of the adverse effect of the £ slump on UK pensioners in Spain who saw the value of their pensions decline dramatically, or UK based businesses reliant upon imports from the EU).
We already know that since Brexit the value of the pound has collapsed, inflation has risen significantly above the Bank of England interest rate, the real value of UK workers' wages has declined dramatically, and the UK has slumped to the lowest growth rate in the EU.
Now a study from the Centre for Economic Performance and the London School of Economics has calculated the scale of the damage for ordinary working people.
According to their calculations, the post-Brexit rise in inflation has caused price increases of £404 per year for the average household.
If the damage is calculated in terms of the reduced real value of workers' wages, it's equivalent to a £448 per year pay cut for the average worker, which is the equivalent of losing an entire week's salary.
The extraordinary thing is that Brexit has already collapsed the UK growth rate, caused a significant rise in inflation, and trashed the real incomes of millions of ordinary British workers, yet it hasn't even happened yet!
Had David Cameron triggered Article 50 on June 24th like he said he would, the UK would already have had to have concluded the Brexit negotiations by the end of 2017 so as to leave time for the ratification process (any EU-UK deal is subject to democratic approval in the parliaments of all EU member states).
So given that Brexit has robbed millions of workers of the equivalent of a whole week's wages, and that the impact on the wider economy is right in the middle of the forecasts, isn't it about time that we lob these dishonest "Brexit isn't so bad", "Remain were pushing project fear lies" tropes into the dustbin (a bin that is already pretty damned full of other Brexiteer lies)?
But even as we're lobbing this dishonest Brexiteer trope in the bin, they're coming up with a new propaganda narrative aimed at pinning the blame for the Brexit damage onto pretty much anyone who is opposed to their own fanatical "no deal" interpretation of the Brexit vote.
The Brexiteers accused Remainers of lying and fearmongering when the economic predictions showed that Brexit would be bad for the UK economy and bad for ordinary British workers, and now that these predictions are demonstrably coming true, they're now seeking to pin the blame for their own mess onto the very people who predicted these negative outcomes in the first place!
The problem of course is that it's ridiculously difficult to reason people out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into in the first place. So people who are ideologically committed to Brexit will shrug off the erosion of their own wages, and accept the Brexiteer propositions that the blame for any negative outcomes lies with anyone but the Brexiteers themselves (Remainers, the EU27, the courts, the opposition parties, academics who dare to critique the Brexit process, the left-liberal elements of the press, economists and other experts ...).
To many people Brexit is like a religious cult based on the unquestionable assertion that "Brexit is good", so even if they're shown how it isn't good, they'll tinker around with ancillary beliefs until they develop a convenient excuse.
Just as the religious cult leaders might absolve the gods of blame for the devastating flood/drought/famine by claiming it's vengeance for the people not praying hard enough, the leaders of the Brexit cult are beginning to insist that Brexit isn't to blame for the low growth/high inflation/collapsing wages, but that the public are to blame for not believing in Brexit fervently enough!
We know that Brexit is already harming the UK economy and the lives of millions of ordinary workers, and we know that the damage will be very much worse if the hard-right Tories get the ruinous "no deal" Brexit they're craving. So the only way of stopping this extreme Brexit disaster from happening is by breaking people out of the Brexit cult, which is clearly easier said than done.
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Had the Brexit campaigners actually ever come up with a serious policy document outlining their plans for how to manage the Brexit transition period, and a proposal for what post-Brexit Britain was to look like, I would have given the idea of quitting the EU some serious consideration. But since there was no policy document, nor any outline of realistic objectives, it was beyond obvious that the whole thing would turn into an extraordinarily damaging let's make it up as we go along Tory administered farce.
And just look at the state of it now:
- We've passed the halfway point between the Brexit vote and the deadline of March 29th 2019, we're still completely stalled on the very first phase of the negotiations!
- The fanatical hard-right faction of the Tory party are propagandising ever more loudly for a ruinous "no deal" flounce out of Europe, and they're continuing to drag their weak and directionless leader ever closer to the economic cliff edge.
- Tories like Liam Fox are proposing reductions in UK consumer protections and product standards as part of a UK-US trade deal. Any such reductions would render access to the Single Market impossible because continued free trade between the UK and EU would create a gateway for US companies to sneak their inferior products into the European market.
- The right-wing fringe of the Tory party that are dictating Theresa May's every move are desperate to ensure the most chaotic possible form of Brexit because they know that the ensuing economic disaster will provide rich pickings for their disaster capitalist mates, who will use the post-Brexit economic meltdown to grab £billions in British infrastructure and assets, like vultures stripping the meat off a corpse.
- Hard right Tories and billionaires like James Dyson are pushing ever harder to use Brexit as an opportunity to trash UK workers' rights and to turn Britain into a huge corporate tax haven with a 0% corporation tax rate.
The extraordinary thing is that the hard-right fringe of the Tory party are still trying to pass off this shambolic lurching towards an economic cliff-edge into a hard-right abyss of disaster capitalism, trashed workers rights, and ever more giveaways to corporations and the mega-rich as the "will of the people".
Hardly any Brexit voter will have voted the way they did because they actually wanted even more exploitation of British workers, even more handouts for corporations and the mega-rich, and a disastrous economic meltdown to make the bankers' crisis look like a picnic in comparison. But the hard-right Brexiteers are still trying to pass off their shambolic scheming as "the will of the people" regardless.
Only a tiny fraction of Leave voters must have envisioned a Brexit that involved gutting the value of the pound; tanking the British economy; allowing vulture capitalists to buy up £billions worth of British infrastructure and assets on the cheap; binning British workers' rights and consumer protections; trashing trading relationships with our European allies; eroding parliamentary sovereignty; scrapping British people's rights to live/work/study/retire in any of 31 other European countries; and reducing the British state to grovelling and begging on the world stage for trade deals.
But in a way the hard-right Brexit fanatics are right to continue calling this mess "the will of the people" because millions upon millions of people voted Leave despite the warnings that the Brexiteers had nothing even remotely resembling a coherent Brexit plan, and that a "let's make it up as we go along" Brexit administered by the Tory party would surely end up being an extremely damaging shambles, especially for people like the young, the working poor and the vulnerable.
Brexit voters had absolutely no excuse for not knowing that the Tories have spent the previous six years relentlessly squeezing the poor and ordinary in order to lavish huge tax cuts on corporations and the mega rich.
They must have known that the Tories had overseen the worst slump in the real value of UK workers' wages since records began; slashed in-work benefits for the working poor; massively increased child poverty; lumbered students with vast unpayable debts; attacked workers' rights; savagely mistreated sick and disabled people; devastated public services; and allowed an absolute explosion of exploitative employment practices.
They can't have failed to notice that while the Tories were loading the burden of austerity dogma onto ordinary people, they were simultaneously slashing corporation tax to the lowest level of any advanced economy, lavishing vast bonuses on bankers at loss-making publicly owned banks, selling off swathes of public infrastructure on the cheap to their mega-rich mates, stuffing the unelected House of Lords full of their cronies, and continually cutting taxes for the very richest people in Britain.
There's no way that it's possible to imagine that a political party with a proven track record like that would somehow reverse direction and suddenly decide to manage the Brexit process in the best interests of ordinary British people (rather than on behalf of the tiny mega-rich clique who bankroll their party).
So in a way this absolute farce is "the will of the people", because people were clearly and repeatedly warned that a Tory administered Brexit would surely descend into chaos and Tory fantasies of turning Britain into a hard-right dystopia, but they voted for it anyway.
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Apparently the British negotiating team still had their papers in their bags when the photo was taken, but the confident Europeans with their stacks of briefing papers sitting opposite the Brits armed only with inane grins and misplaced confidence is a powerful visual metaphor for how the Brexit process is going so far.
The EU negotiating team have finalised and published detailed Brexit position papers on a whole range of different aspects of the Brexit negotiations, and their stance is universally backed by the 27 remaining EU states, which is no mean feat given that they range from the extreme-right governments in Poland and Hungary all the way through to Syriza in Greece and the Communist-backed government in Portugal).
It's a national embarrassment to Britain that our negotiating team is so chaotic. Not only are the British public still deeply divided on whether Brexit should even be going ahead after all the lies and dodgy dealings during the referendum campaign, the Tories who have been charged with delivering Brexit are all pulling in different directions.
Tory Brexit is turning out to be just as chaotic and damaging as almost all of the economic and international law experts predicted during the rushed referendum debate in 2016.
The problem isn't just that the Tories didn't even draw up a contingency plan for what to do in case David Cameron's EU referendum gamble backfired, it's that the governing party is still deeply divided on what they want to achieve out of the Brexit process.
The Tories aren't just split between two camps any more like they used to be (Europhobes and Europhiles) they've fractured into all kinds of factions, each arguing for their own agendas under Theresa May's weak leadership, and agreeing on one thing only, that the opposition parties and devolved parliaments should be given as little influence over the Brexit process as possible.
On Sunday 16th July the Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond made the extraordinary admission that there are some members of the cabinet who don't agree with his stance (brazenly one he just nicked off Labour) that protecting British jobs and the UK economy should be the first priorities of the Brexit negotiations.
We can have a good guess as to who these cabinet members are who would sacrifice other people's jobs and living standards to secure the hard-right extreme Brexit they crave. They're clearly the same ones who talked Theresa May into adopting her toddler tantrum Brexit strategy of endlessly repeating her give us exactly what we want or we'll walk away with nothing threats, that do nothing but massively increase the likelihood of an extreme "no deal" Brexit.
There's ginning David Davis, who is so clearly out of his depth it would be hilarious if our national reputation and the living standards of millions weren't hanging on his ability to suddenly and miraculously develop some basic levels of competence.
There's Boris Johnson who seems to have carte blanche to just make up whatever positions he likes, including telling the EU to "go whistle" during a parliamentary debate, for which he received the usual mild rebuke and no further action for what would be firing/resignation offences under the leadership of anyone but the weakest of Prime Ministers.
Then there are the absolutely clueless gibberish-spewing buffoons like Owen Paterson, who actually claimed that the UK could obtain the benefits of the Single Market by imposing import tariffs on EU produce, meaning he's apparently unaware that the main benefit of the Single Market is the lack of import/export tariffs!
Then there are the reluctant Brexiters, who know perfectly well that Brexit is going to be a social and economic catastrophe for the UK, and campaigned against it during the referendum debate, but who are now clearly prioritising the interests of the Tory party way above the nation as a whole by supporting a policy that they know will do severe long-term harm to the economy and to the national reputation.
Last of all is the almost eradicated Europhile faction which is now represented in the House of Commons by the solitary backbench figure of Ken Clarke (the only Tory MP to vote against invoking Article 50).
The source of this chaos is obviously Theresa May's feeble directionless leadership.
Instead of defining a clear position and making sure her cabinet members stick to it, she's allowing them to say whatever the hell they like, and contradict each other time and again, without taking any real disciplinary action whatever, even when they come out with outrageously confusing and counterproductive gibberish.
Either the Tory cabinet ministers are continually bickering and contradicting one another because they're as unclear about the official Brexit negotiating position as the rest of us are, or they do actually know what the supposed endgame is, but they're got such contempt for their own party leader that they feel free to defy her by claiming whatever they like with total impunity.
Whatever the causes of this chaos, disunity and infighting within Theresa May's cabinet, it's clearly an absolute embarrassment to the UK that while 27 politically diverse nations have come together to formulate clear, timely and transparent negotiating positions after having had Brexit thrust upon them, the Tory party that brought us Brexit in the first place are so shockingly disunited.
I know "I told you so" is not a good look, but anyone who imagined that the fanatical hard-right fringe of the Tory party would be capable of delivering anything but an absolute shambles must at least be feeling their misplaced faith evaporating away quite quickly by now.
These hard-right Europhobes had four whole decades of whinging to actually develop a plan for getting out of the EU, but incredibly they're still too busy fighting and bickering amongst themselves to focus on the job that they created for themselves, even an entire year after the referendum result, and with the Article 50 clock ticking away.
Options
There are four main options for the UK.
1. Just muddle along and pretend that Theresa May and the absolutely chaotic party she's so demonstrably failing to lead aren't slow-marching us off an economic cliff until the ground begins actually crumbling away beneath our feet.
2. Demand a more inclusive Brexit that at least offers the opposition parties and devolved governments some proper influence over the UK's negotiating objectives (highly unlikely with a wannabe tyrant like Theresa May still clinging desperately to power).
3. Demand a second referendum on the final Brexit terms. Whether this would act as a safeguard against Theresa May doing a catastrophic "no deal" strop would depend entirely on the EU, since it's up to them whether they would accept the revocation of Article 50 in the event of a "please stop this madness now" referendum vote.
4. Demand another General Election, in which Labour would almost certainly make significant gains, either winning a majority, or taking enough Tory seats to form a progressive coalition. It would be unlikely that such a move would be enough to stop Brexit entirely, but at least it would hand the task of sorting out the mess to Keir Starmer QC, who is much more qualified for such a vital job than bumbling David Davis.
Obviously none of these options are ideal, but then we're the ones who voted to put ourselves in this ridiculous position last year, so we're just going to have to own the consequences.
Obviously the first option is the worst of the lot, but unless there's some concerted effort to stop it going this way, the cliff edge is clearly the direction of travel.
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